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Class_JB§L/o g? 

Book . ^3& /fk 

Copyright^ c*rifr«j 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



&n American SEoman's ILtfe anti flBorft. 



A MEMORIAL 



OF 



MARY CLEMMER 



BY 



EDMUND HUDSON 




BOSTON 

TICKNOR AND COMPANY 

1886 









Copyright, 18S6, 
By Edmund Hudson. 



AH rights reserved. 



ainibfTSito ^nss : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



Co t&e beautiful iJlemarp 

OF 

THE NOBLE AND GENTLE WOMAN, 

POET, LOVER OF HER COUNTRY, AND 

FOLLOWER OF CHRIST, 

WHOSE MORTAL PART WAS LAID AT REST IN ROCK-CREEK 

CHURCHYARD, WASHINGTON, 

AUGUST THE TWENTIETH, 18S4; 

HER WORK UNFINISHED, HER LIFE ON EARTH 
UNTIMELY ENDED; 

ONE TO WHOM SHE IV AS DEAREST FRIEND 
AND SWEETEST COMRADE 

Urtncntcs tins Volume. 



PREFACE. 



npHE new edition of the writings of Mary 
Clemmer, which this volume is intended 
to supplement and to complete, was determined 
upon very soon after her decease. It was at 
first proposed to issue a new volume of letters 
and sketches to be selected from her contribu- 
tions to the newspaper for which she wrote. 
With this were to be included the novel " His 
Two Wives," the " Poems of Life and Nature," 
the " Outlines of Men, Women, and Things," 
and a brief memorial volume, — five volumes in 
all. This plan was changed when it became 
evident that a satisfactory account of her life 
and work could not be given without quoting 
very freely from her writings, and that it would 



ii PREFACE. 

be advisable to add a number of essays and 
sketches to the " Outlines," while a few articles 
in that collection which possessed a greater 
interest when first published than at the pres- 
ent time could be omitted. The title of that 
collection has been changed to "Men, Women, 
and Things," and the volume has been brought 
out in new form, uniform with the other vol- 
umes, which now number four instead of five, 
as at first contemplated. 

The novel and the volume of poems remain 
as they came from her hand. A few of her later 
poems which are not included in the collection 
of 1882 will be found in this volume. During 
the last year of her life she was unable to do 
much writing, and all of her poems written be- 
fore 1883 which she cared to preserve appear in 
her own collection. Some poems written in her 
earlier years which have been sent to me by 
friendly hands have not been included here 
because she had, in making up her volume, 
deliberately omitted them. 



PREFACE. lii 

In the publication of the present volume 
there has been unavoidable delay, for which the 
publishers are in no wise responsible. Engross- 
ing occupations from which the writer was 
unable wholly to escape even for a single day 
have interfered with the proper performance of 
a duty to which all other engagements would 
have been gladly sacrificed. It is with a keen 
sense of inadequacy and of shortcoming that I 
have committed this volume to the press, asking 
for it the indulgent judgment of all who knew 
and loved Mary Clemmer. I am under obliga- 
tions to many of her friends for materials of 
which I have made some use in these chapters ; 
and they will know that the acknowledgment 
of this obligation is not lacking in gratitude if 
made in a general, and not personal, way. 

The portrait which accompanies this volume 
is a reproduction of a photograph taken by 
Brady in Washington about five years prior 
to her death. There are other portraits more 
satisfactory to some who knew her, but per- 



IV PREFACE. 

haps no one of them conveys so accurate an 
idea of her personal bearing ; certainly there is 
none which seems to me to express so much 
character as this one. 

E. H. 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter Page 

I. Introduction 7 

II. Family History. — Her Father's Hu- 
guenot Descent. — The Craines of 
the Isle op Man. — Early Life in 
Utica. — Marriage ....... 22 

III. Personal Traits axd Characteristics. 

■ — Religious Life 46 

IV. Her Work in Literature and Jour- 

nalism 66 

V. Friendships. — Personal Relations to 

various Men and Women . . . . 90 
VI. Love of Country. — Experience during 
the War. — Experience as a Writer 

on Public Affairs 116 

VII. Devotion to the Welfare of Women. — 

The Suffrage and other Questions . 147 
VIII. Love of Nature, expressed in Prose 

and Poetry 163 



vi CONTENTS. 

Chapter Page 

IX. Power to delineate Character. — Per- 
sonal Descriptions of Public Men . 176 
X. Concerning her Poetry. — How It was 

REGARDED BY HERSELF AND BY OTHERS 197 

XI. The Visit in Europe. — IIer last Ill- 
ness. — Death 211 

XII. The Funeral. — Rock Creek Church- 
yard. — Some Personal Tributes . . 227 



AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 



CHAPTER I. 

Introduction. 

HPHE preparation of this volume, recording as 
fully as may be the story of the life of Mary 
Clemmer and of her work in the world, is not 
simply the performance of a sad duty of affection 
to one that is gone who should be here, although 
this motive, if there had been no other to inspire 
it, would have sufficed. Nor is it only a memo- 
rial of the warmly cherished friend and the 
admired and esteemed writer, put forth in obe- 
dience to the wishes of those who cherished and 
admired her. This also might have been held a 
sufficient reason for the publication of an ade- 
quate account of her. The number is not small 
of those who have warmly desired that Mary 



8 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

Clemraer should be thus commemorated. But 
there is ampler justification for the volume here 
presented. She lived a consecrated life ; a life 
full of brave purpose, of high endeavor, of 
earnest and conscientious work, of patriotic and 
poetic feeling, of tenderness and self-sacrifice, 
of all womanly virtues and worthiness, — so 
that it remains a permanently useful and help- 
ful life to all who are or may become familiar 
with it, — and because by making known all 
her qualities of mind and heart, all that she 
was as well as all she did, there will be re- 
vealed a noble and lovely human character and 
a fit representative of American womanhood, 
this book is added to the volumes which em- 
body her literary work. No person who did 
not know her well can fully acquaint himself 
with the spirit which animated and controlled 
her, and the circumstances which mainly af- 
fected her life, without feeling an increase of 
respect and of admiration for one who fought 
her battle in the world so well, and put always 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

into all she did the very best that was in her. 
" Her soul seemed to me spotless," writes one 
who knew her long and intimately; and the 
words will not seem exaggerated to any who 
came within the charmed circle of her private 
and personal life. 

There are many persons in the world to whom 
the thought of Mary Clemmer's death must 
always bring not only the feeling of personal 
regret and sadness, but a keen sense of wrong. 
How passionately she wished and prayed for 
continued life ! She who had lived through so 
much of suffering and weariness and loss, and 
learned so well how to use to highest advantage 
of mind and spirit the days of rest; happiness, 
and peace that seemed to be before her, had won 
the right to live if any human being could be 
endowed with it. Once her strength had been 
spent almost entirely for others ; but now at last 
the day appeared to be at hand when she could 
live her own true life untrammelled by intel- 
lectual or personal obligations of any sort. 



10 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

She saw spread out before her a vista of serene 
and peaceful days in which she could do the 
things she wished to do, and be herself as happy 
as she wished those around her always to be. A 
hundred times before, the struggle and the suf- 
fering which fate had imposed upon her had so 
weighted down her soul that she would gladly 
have given up the effort to live, and gone will- 
ingly to another state of existence. Now, there 
remained no more the need of toil nor the ex- 
actions of compelling tasks to consume her days 
and her vitality, and to forbid the finer mental 
work she aspired to do. The privilege — the 
one privilege she had prayed for and trusted 
Heaven to give to her — of having " a few good 
years " before she died that she might use to 
develop the larger powers she felt she possessed, 
hung for a little while before her gaze like a 
vision of an earthly paradise, and then was torn 
away from the weary and disappointed eyes. 

"I do hope my life work is not ended," were 
her words spoken barely two weeks before she 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

passed away. They were spoken in a voice 
full of sad yearning for the opportunity to 
do that which she had aimed to do. But 
she was struck down midway in her career, 
in the full possession of all her powers, be- 
fore she had done what she believed was to 
be her best literary work, and at a time 
when she cared most to live, and cherished 
the fondest hopes of the future. What she 
wrote of her loved friend, Alice Cary, might 
with equal truth have been written years 
afterward of herself: — 

" When a dear one, dying willingly, lets go of life, 
the loosened hands by so much reconcile us to their 
going. It was not so with Alice. Through physi- 
cal suffering almost beyond precedent, through days 
and nights and years of hopeless illness, she yet 
clung to this life ; not through any lack of faith in 
the other and higher, but because it seemed to her 
that she had not yet exhausted the possibilities, the 
fulness, and sweetness of this. She thought that 
there was a fruition in life, in its labor, its love, 
which she had never realized ; and even in dying 
she longed for it." 



12 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

That her life was thus cut short must be 
attributed wholly to the dreadful accident that 
befell her in January, 1878, when, being im- 
pressed with the belief that the horses behind 
which she was riding were uncontrolled by the 
driver and running away, she, in sheer fright, 
and having lost all self-command, jumped from 
her carriage into a Washington street. Her 
head was thrown with terrible force upon the 
stone curbing, and that she was not instantly 
killed was almost miraculous. Although it 
seemed for a time that she might recover from 
the effects of that concussion, yet the physi- 
cians' examination and her subsequent symp- 
toms proved only too conclusively that there 
was a fracture of the skull at its base ; and for 
such an injury medical skill was powerless to 
furnish a remedy. For three years previous to 
this accident she had suffered intensely from 
neuralgia in the face and eyes, brought on by 
overwork ; and the terrific blow received when 
she fell from the carriage inevitably increased 



INTRODUCTION. 13 

the inflammation and the suffering that had be- 
fore rendered her existence so painful. Daring 
the last years of her life the torture she suffered 
was excruciating and constant, and it was often 
a matter for wonder that she was able to use 
brain or hand at all. For months at a time she 
endured the keenest physical anguish. What 
she suffered, how she was depressed by her 
great pain, and how she still kept on hoping for 
a release from it, is well told in a letter written 
at Littleton, New Hampshire, in August, 1880, 
in which she said : — 

" I thought this morning, as the pang in my head 
woke me, that if some morning I could awake and 
find it gone, it would be as if I awakened in a new 
world and it was Paradise. Every day I ci*y : ' How 
long, O Lord, how long! ' Yet there is not a mo- 
ment's respite, day or night. I can be so conscious 
of nothing as of this excruciating pain in my head 
and eyes, for it makes almost everything else impos- 
sible. It is not any place, but myself, and no place 
yet has been able to alleviate the condition. While 
suffering so at the South I thought if I could only 
get North I would be better. I come North and 



A 



14 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

am no better. How can I help being discouraged ? 
And yet I hope that some morning I shall awake 
and find again my old self. God only knows." 

If it be considered that this account of her 
condition might have been written on almost 
any day of the last six years of her life, and 
that there was hardly a day during all that 
period when she did not at least try to do 
some literary work, the conditions under which 
she labored may perhaps be better understood 
by some who have wondered that she did not 
accomplish more in those years. To those who 
saw her from day to clay and realized at the 
time how much she suffered, it seemed wonder- 
ful that she produced anything at all. Doubt- 
less she should have rested wholly, and been 
free from all care, during the years immediately 
following the injury to her head; but there 
were several reasons that made this quite im- 
possible, not the least of which was her solici- 
tude for her venerated father, who gradually 
failed in health for a number of years prior 



INTRODUCTION. 15 

to his decease in 1881. Perhaps, however, her 
greatest incentive to mental effort was the fear 
which constantly haunted her that she might 
not be spared to do all she desired to do in 
the world. She had done much good work 
before she was prostrated in 1878 ; but all 
she had done was to her as nothing when she 
thought of what she aspired to accomplish and 
what she believed herself capable of accomplish- 
ing. She had written on public affairs and 
about public men while she felt the need of 
a steady income, but of that drudgery she had 
had more than enough. She had written the 
beautiful memorial of the Car}' - sisters, in which 
is embodied some of her best work. She had 
produced three novels, the second a marked 
advance upon its predecessor, and the last so 
well received that she had reason to feel high 
hopes of larger success in the field of fiction- 
writing. She had written poetry from her 
sixteenth year, which when gathered into a 
volume in 1882 was received with a greater 



16 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

degree of favor than is often manifested for 
collections of poems, even of the work of some 
well-known poets, in these days. She had 
acquired a wide and remarkable knowledge 
of human life and of human nature, which she 
could have richly utilized in the novels to 
which she would have devoted her literary 
energies had her life been spared. Tempting 
opportunities for the publication of her literary 
handiwork were continually presenting them- 
selves to her. Alas ! they were all to be put 
aside unused. The verses she had written in 
a mood of sadness many years before, when life 
had still much in store for her, now only too 
accurately described what was to come : — 

"A few more mornings, yet a few more mornings, 

We '11 watch the light's low dawning, dull and gray ; 
A few more mornings, and we '11 faintly murmur 

To those who love us, ' 'T is our latest day.' 
From weary brows will fall the life-worn mask, 
From tired hands will drop the half-done task. 

" A few more mornings, hut a few more mornings, 
Others will take the work that we laid down, — 



INTRODUCTION. 17 

Will lift it where we left it in the shadows, 

Will bear its cross, perchance will wear the crown 
We sighed for, toiled for, all our fleeting hours — 
The crown of crowns, that never could be ours. 

" A few more morns, — 't will all be told, our story, 

So sweet, so brief ! Why war with changeless fate ? 
Why cry for love ? Why spend our strength for glory ? 

Why pray to God with prayer importunate ? 
His centuries go ; we still must come and pass 
But as the shadows on the summer grass. 

" A few more mornings, — then again in beauty 
The earth will wear the splendor of her springs ; 
While we, within the universe of spirits, 

Will wander somewhere among viewless things. 
Where'er it be, in all the heaven of air, 
We still must see our human home is fair; 
Wondrous must be God's gift to compensate 
For all we miss within our human fate." 

When thus fatally hurt Mary Clemmer had 
reached the age of thirty-eight; yet her name 
had been prominently before the public as a 
writer for the press for so many years that some 
readers who did not know to the contrary had 
come to think of her as a person of much 
greater age. The popularity she had achieved 
2 



18 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

and the audience she had won chiefly through 
her journalistic work rightly entitled her to 
believe that there was in store for her a 
larger measure of success in the future, when, 
free from care and confining obligations, she 
could give to literature the free and devoted 
spirit of the true artist. A survey of the crea- 
tive work of women in English literature will 
easily show that while some have become fa- 
mous as writers before the age at which Mary 
Clemmer was so wounded and physically pros- 
trated that steady application became impossible 
to her, yet that most of the good and enduring 
work of women in our literature has been done 
after authors have passed that age. When it 
is remembered that George Eliot was thirty- 
eight at the time her first story was pub- 
lished, that Mrs. Browning was married at 
thirty-seven and produced most of her best 
work afterward, that Mrs. Stowe was thirty- 
nine when she wrote "Uncle Tom," that Miss 
Alcott was thirty-seven when her first note- 



INTRODUCTION. 19 

worthy story was published, and that the la- 
mented Mrs. Helen Jackson would hardly have 
been known in literature if she had produced 
nothing after her fortieth year, it will be real- 
ized how important to their reputations were 
the years of mature effort that constitute the 
period more commonly described in speaking of 
men than of women as that of " middle life." 
Of course there are notable exceptions, as in the 
case of Margaret Fuller, whose literary career 
may be said to have ended with her marriage at 
the age of thirty-seven ; but the fact remains 
that most of the solid work of women in liter- 
ature has been done after they have passed the 
age of thirty-seven or thirty-eight. There are 
few authors of either sex, who, when distinc- 
tion and success have been won, have not 
wished to suppress and put away out of sight 
some of their earliest literary productions. If 
Mary Clemmer could have produced results in 
poetry and in fiction which satisfied her own 
ideals, it may have been that she would have 



20 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

gladly dismissed as unimportant some part of 
what she had printed during the first years of 
her literary activity ; but that she ever failed 
to put earnest effort and the most conscien- 
tious purpose into anything she undertook, 
no one who knew her would venture to assert. 
Whether her high ambition in literature could 
have been realized had her life been spared, it 
is not necessary or proper here to inquire. But 
those who stood nearest to her and felt most 
directly the splendid energy of soul and the 
noble intellectual purpose which animated her 
may be pardoned for cherishing the belief that 
opportunity alone was lacking to have secured 
for her a higher place in American authorship 
than she succeeded in attaining. 

But enough of what might have been ! And 
let it not be thought that it is intended even 
to suggest an apology for anything that she 
actually wrote or published. In the portrayal 
of a life so sincere, so courageous, so helpful and 
healthful as was hers, there will be found noth- 



INTRODUCTION. 21 

ing to be explained away or to be apologized 
for. No contributor to the American press has 
shown greater candor, truer courage, or a more 
patriotic spirit than she brought to her work ; 
and few writers, even of the opposite sex, have 
been more influential. If as poet she did not 
claim to rank with the highest, it will not be 
denied that she showed natural power as a 
versifier, or that she expressed tender emotion, 
sensibility to the beauty of- Nature, and deep 
religious feeling in metrical forms that were 
highly meritorious in the judgment of the more 
severely critical, and that possessed an abiding 
charm for many who could rightly claim a spirit- 
ual kinship with her. Her poetry was the ex- 
pression of herself; and had she sought no other 
form of expression, she must still have made 
her place in American literature. 



CHAPTER II. 

Family History. — Her Father's Huguenot Descent. — 
The Craines of the Isle of Man. — Her Early Life 
in Utica. — Her Marriage. 

■jV/TARY CLEMMER felt an honest pride in 
her ancestry, and she had a right to this 
feeling. It often happened to her to be asked 
from whom she inherited her splendid physical 
organization and her mental gifts. She was 
never slow in acknowledging the large measure 
of physical and mental endowment which came 
to her directly from her parents, to whom her 
devotion was ever most affectionate and loyal. 
They transmitted to her not only an honorable 
name and the example of virtuous and worthy 
lives, but qualities of mind and heart which 
had been developed through a long and honor- 
able ancestry. In looking through the family 



FAMILY HISTORY. 23 

history it appeared to her and to her friends 
that her relation was especially close and her 
obligation exceedingly strong to the two grand- 
mothers, only one of whom she ever saw, whose 
characters seem to have been remarkable for 
their force and efficiency, and who were un- 
questionably women of unusual intelligence and 
power. From them she inherited that high 
and indomitable spirit which distinguished her 
whole life, and that earnestness and benevo- 
lence of nature which made her such a strong 
force in the lives of so many others. Barbara 
Schelle} r , whose name she always wished she 
might have had, and Margaret Craine were two 
notable women. Perhaps in giving the facts 
of her family history it will not be amiss to 
quote from an excellent article in a volume 
entitled " Our Famous Women " (1884), con- 
tributed by Miss Whiting, as the statements 
there made are sufficiently full and accurate. 

" Her father, Abraham Clemmer, a native of Penn- 
sylvania, was of Huguenot descent. Her mother, 



24 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

Margaret Kneale, was born iu the Isle of Man. 
The Clemmer family trace their origin to Alsatia. 
Their name in the Fatherland was spelled Klemmer. 
In 1685, when Louis XIV. pushed his persecutions 
of the Huguenots past the borders of France into the 
very heart of Germany, the Clemmer family were 
among the million Huguenots who then fled from 
their native soil to seek refuge in strange lands. 
They settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania, before 
the American Revolution. Jonas Clemmer, the fa- 
ther of Abraham Clemmer, an educated man, a 
teacher by profession, died when his son was but 
five years of age, — his death changing the entire 
earthly destiny of his child. 

"The mother of Abraham Clemmer, born Barbara 
Schelle}-, came also from Huguenot stock. The 
male members of her family for many generations 
had been practitioners of medicine or professors of 
medical science. Her brothers were educated as 
physicians, and their sons to-da}' are practising 
physicians in the State of Pennsylvania. She, a 
girl, denied the liberal education bestowed upon her 
brothers, possessed in no less degree than they the 
instinct of healing. With none of the training that 
bestows a college diploma, she became famous in 
the country surrounding her home for her knowledge 
of medicines, her skill in using them, and in healing 
the sick. A woman of magnificent constitution, of 
great force of character, of profound sweetness of 



HER FATHERS HUGUENOT DESCENT. 25 

disposition, she died in the homestead in Pennsyl- 
vania, where she lived from her youth, as late as 
the year 1873, aged eighty-two years. 

"The early death of his father, with the burden 
that death cast upon his mother of caring for a 
growing family, were together the causes which de- 
nied to Abraham Clemmer the liberal education, the 
thorough mental discipline, which, up to his time, 
had been the birthright of his family. 

" The mother of Mary Clemmer (born Margaret 
Kneale) came from the Isle of Man. This little 
island, in the storm-tossed Irish Sea, has an impor- 
tance wholly disproportionate to its geographical 
extent. It has a government of its own, a House 
of Parliament, a people descended through genera- 
tions of noble blood, a striking and eventful history. 
In Hawthorne's ' English Note-book ' he has recorded 
his impressions of the historic spot ; and from its 
scenery and romantic traditions Scott collected his 
material for ' Peveril of the Peak.' The island 
history dates back to the time that the Norsemen 
were mighty in the West. 

" Wordsworth's famous line, — 

' The light that never was on sea or land, 

is in a poem that was ' suggested by a picture of 
Peele Castle in a storm.' Just outside the ramparts 
of that castle Margaret Kneale was born, and under 
its ancient archways she played through all her 



26 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

childhood. The influences of this spot entered into 
her life, and have flowered into consciousness in the 
life of her gifted daughter. 

" The Isle of Man lies in a temperature that 
fosters a wonderful beauty and luxuriance of Nature. 
Fuchsias grow and mass their scarlet blossoms ten 
and twelve feet high. The mist-crowned heights 
shine sun-touched and fair above the purple defiles 
of rocky valleys over which foam-crested cascades 
rush, tumbling into the river below. An old legend 
runs that the isle had once a wizard king who 
enshrouded it with vapor. Here King Harold 
Harfager reigned, and here the Vikings held their 
sea-throne. Myth and legend have vanished now. 
The island is only seventy-five miles from Liverpool, 
and a line of daily steamers connects it with the 
outer world. Yet something in the sturdy poise of 
its race recalls the old motto of the land, — Quo- 
cunque jeceris stabit. ('However you throw it, it 
will stand.') The old enchantment hovers over the 
spot, although a sail of six hours brings one into 
the life of to-day. 

' ' In response to a request from the writer of this 
sketch, Mary Clemmer wrote of her father : — 

" ' The first memory I recall of the aspect of my 
father was when I was five years old. They placed 
me in a high chair at the tea-table, and instead of 
eating, I sat gazing at my father, because, to my 
child's vision, he looked so handsome. My first 



HER FATHER'S HUGUENOT DESCENT. 27 

outburst of grief I recall at the same table, when a 
person told me that sometime my father's raven hair 
would be gray. The announcement to me was so 
terrible I burst into tears. 

'"Abraham Clemmer carried in his bearing and on 
his face the visible stamp of a superior race. He 
was of fine stature, with an alert step and a haughty 
poise of the head. His features were patrician in 
outline and expression. His head high, his hair 
black and curling, his brows arched, his hazel eyes 
dark and full, his nose finely aquiline, his mouth as 
exquisitely cut as Apollo's, with the suggestion of 
disdain in its curves, yet full of sweetness. This 
was the beaut} 7 of his prime. In old age, in its 
patriarchal aspect, it became still more uncommon, 
and in death was so remarkable that those who had 
never seen him in life, looking upon him in his last 
sleep robed for the grave, recall his face to-day, with 
the seal of ineffable peace upon it, as one of the 
most nobly beautiful that they had ever gazed upon 
in death. 

" ' He had the temperament of the poet. He loved 
Nature with that passion Avhich finds in her presence 
perpetual satisfaction and solace. He loved beauty 
with the fine fervor that makes its love religion. 
He loved music with an enthusiasm that was in itself 
an inspiration. He wrote with great elegance, drew 
with remarkable accuracy and facilit}', was a natural 
linoruist. 



28 . AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

" 'With clue opportunity he would have excelled 
as an artist, or have succeeded by any profession 
demanding the development of the finest mental 
faculties, What in his noble life he never attained 
was the power of calculation indispensable to merely 
material success. 

k ' ' Born of a race for many generations devoted 
exclusively to artistic and scientific pursuits, the cal- 
culating insight, the forethought of the money-getter, 
the commercial instinct that commands financial 
gain, were left by nature out of his temperamental 
and mental make-up. 

" ' Uuadapted in every way to a life of business, 
the circumstances of his lot doomed him early to it, 
with the inevitable sequence, — failure in all the 
results that build up financial fortune. He lived and 
died a poor man, bequeathing to his children as their 
supreme earthly inheritance the necessity of shaping 
life for themselves. His generosity was a fault, giv- 
ing to others — often to the unworthy — what he 
should have kept for himself and his children. Hon- 
orable at any cost to himself, his heart was full of 
charity. In my whole life I never heard him speak 
to the detriment of any human being. The absent 
were alwa}s safe in his kindly and gentle speech. 
His 3011th glowed with fire and with dreams for the 
future, whose fulfilment the limitations of his lot 
made impossible. 

fc ' 'No man ever put more patience, more industry, 



HER FATHER'S HUGUENOT DESCENT. 29 

more energy, into his struggles for a home and a 
competency. With a little, only a little, more iron 
in his nature, he could have compelled adversity 
to yield to fortune, — could have commanded the 
friends, who never dreamed that they could serve 
him till it was too late. It was not in him. He 
yielded to the blows of adverse fate — he never 
struck back. He accepted at last the fact of mate- 
rial failure as the final sum of his lot — accepted it 
with a gentleness and a patience which lifted its very 
pathos into the atmosphere of serenity. But the 
absolute consciousness of this fact was the final blow 
of fortune. It broke his spirit ; after it he never 
struggled again. He mellowed into old age with a 
chikllikcness and sweetness of temper which won the 
hearts of all who approached him. Years of wasting 
malady he bore with a patience that was angelic. 
Hour by hour he drew constant solace from Nature, 
— from the beauty of the green earth that he loved. 
The joy of sight never failed him till it failed him 
on earth forever. Not till the day he died was his 
chair by the window vacant, where for years he had 
gazed out on the roses of his garden, and on the gay 
sights of the streets of the Capital City. 

" 'That Christinas Sabbath morning, 1881, when 
asked if he felt able to go downstairs, for the first 
time he shook his head. Before another morning 
God took him. 

'"A Christian believer from youth, with a smile 



30 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

ineffable which chanced to fall upon the face of his 
child, — his last look on earth, — without a sigh 
he passed out to the Father of his spirit. Never 
did that Father gather back to his all-loving heart 
a more ingenuous, a more gentle, a more loving 
child. 

"'Such, ever-mourned, ever-missed, ever-loved, 
was — is — my father. 

"'One da^' that was his very own, — a day all 
balm and azure and gold, — we laid all of him that 
was dust in God's acre, in the inalienable churchyard 
of Rock Creek, in a suburb of the cit\ r of Washing- 
ton, where the pines will sough, the birds sing above 
his head, the creek murmur, the flowers bloom beside 
him till the Resurrection.' " 

The death of her father was as distressing 
to her as it could have been if he had been 
suddenly removed in his prime. Nearly a ye&v 
afterward, in September, 1882, she said in a 
letter: "Inwardly, I do not get over at all his 
life or his death. Both come back to me every 
hour, and I presume always will." 

To the author of the article previously men- 
tioned Mary Clemmer also wrote as follows of 
her mother and her mother's family : — 



THE CRAINES OF THE ISLE OF MAN. 31 

"William Kneale is a name still most honorably 
known in the Isle of Man as borne by the author, 
Mr. William Kneale, of Douglas. In 1827 my grand- 
father, AVilliam Kneale, a deeply religious and stu- 
dious man, desiring for his young children a larger 
outlook and more extended educational advantages 
than the Isle of Man at that time afforded, sold his 
patrimony, with that of his proud, high-spirited wife 
(born Margaret Craine) , and sailed for America. His 
destination with his family was the State of Ohio ; 
but meeting friends from the island b}' the way, at 
the 3'oung city of Utica, New York, he paused on his 
journey and never resumed it. He at once purchased 
a homestead, which, now in the heart of the city of 
Utica, is still in possession of his family. In this 
homestead grew to womanhood, and was married, 
Margaret Kneale. 

" She was a dazzlingly fair, wide-eyed, blue-eyed 
daughter of the Vikings. She brought with her to 
bleak New York not only the radiant complexion for 
which the women of Mona's Isle are famous, but also 
all the best inherited traits of her ancient race, — 
a passion for liberty in its relation to the whole 
human family ; absolute faith in God ; the deepest, 
most spontaneous religious fervor, with an intense 
desire for knowledge that pervaded her entire 
being. 

' ' The city of Utica, settled b} r many of the oldest 
and most cultivated families of New England, lured 



32 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

from their sterile surroundings by the opulent soil 
and magnificent promise of the Mohawk Valley, was 
from its very beginning a small centre of religious, 
educational, philanthropic, and reformatory ideas and 
action. It was a rallying-point for the early 'Aboli- 
tionists.' Beriah Green, Alvan Stuart, and Gerrit 
Smith, in those days, were the apostles and prophets 
of freedom to the slave. From the convocations 
over which they presided issued such Abolitionists as 
John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell 
Phillips. 

•" To the influence of such public teachers, to the 
marvellously active spirit of ' reform ' which in all 
the churches insisted on the highest thinking, acting, 
and living in every phase of human life, added to 
the same influence in her own home, wherein her 
father was not only the father of his children but a 
father in the Church, may be traced that life-long 
devotion to every good cause, especially to that of 
the downtrodden and oppressed everywhere, which 
marks Margaret Clemmer in Washington to-day as it 
marked young Margaret Kneale in Utica long ago." 

When, in the autumn of 1883, Mary Clemmer 
visited the Isle of Man and found herself amid 
the scenes and surroundings of her mother's 
childhood, she was deeply affected. In the 
hospitable little city of Peel she saw the stone 



THE CRAINES OF THE ISLE OF MAN. 33 

house in which her mother was born. It was 
a part of the patrimony of her grandmother, 
and was sold in 1827 when the family removed 
to America. In the village of Ballaugh, a few 
miles distant, she crossed the threshold of an- 
other stone house, that in which her grand- 
mother was born, and her father before her, 
and no one could say how many generations 
before him. Close to the house stands the 
old stone mill which for centuries lias ground 
the grain of the neighboring farms, — a pictu- 
resque little structure, with its big wheel on 
the outside turned by a pure stream that flows 
from the mountains of Man to the Irish Sea. 
" Squeen Mill," which has been the property 
of the eldest son in each generation for many 
centuries, is now held by John Craine, a lineal 
descendant of the John Craine who was Mary 
Clemmer's great-grandfather. A number of de- 
scendants of the John Craine of 1791 have their 
homes in the parish, and the family gives no 
evidence of decay. It is a family which has 
3 



34 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

always borne a good name, and which has always 
owned and lived upon the homesteads of Bal- 
laugh. The parish registers, which have been 
preserved with much care by the rector, the 
Rev. Mr. Kermode, give the genealogy of the 
Craine family for three centuries. Mr. Kermode 
lias kindly copied the names of the Craines born 
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
and the list is of sufficient interest to find a 
place here. It will be seen that a few names 
were constantly employed from generation to 
generation, and that among them were some 
of the sweetest of feminine Christian names, — 
Mary, Dorothy, Alice, Barbara, Elinor, Bessy, 
Catherine, Letitia. 

BAPTISMS OF THE CRAINE FAMILY. 

Extracted from Ballaugh Parish Register, Isle of Man. 

1608. Ffin : Craine, s. of Wm. C. ' 1622. John, s of Win. C 

1610. Gubbon Craine, s. to Wm. C. of, 1623. Jouy, d. of Ffinlo C 

the Glaick. 
1614. Patrick Craine, s. of Wm. 

Thomas Craine, s. of Phinlo. 

1616. John Craine, b. of Donold. 

1617. Margt. Craine, d. of Wm. 

1619. Nicho : Craine, s. of Donold. 

1620. Jouv, d of Wm. C. (Glaick). 
Jouy, d. of Gilbert C. 
Ffinlo, s. of John C. 

1621 Jouv, d. of John C. 

Isabella, d. Wm. de Carmodell 



1624. John, s of John C. 
Robt., s. Donold de Carmodell. 

1625. Bessy, d. of Donold C. 

1627. AnnC.,d of John C. 
John, r. of Donold C. 

1628. John C, s. of Donold C. 

1629. Margt., d. of Donold C. 
John, s. of Nicholas C. 

1630. Ellin C, d. of John C. 
Jouv, d of John C. 

1631. Hugh, s. of Donold C. 



BAPTISMS OF THE CRAINE FAMILY. 35 



1632. 
1633. 



1635. 
1637. 

1338. 



1644. 
1045. 

1646. 

1647. 
1648. 
1651. 
1654. 

1656. 

1657. 



1858. 



1659. 
1660. 



1661. 



1662. 

1665. 
1667. 
1670. 

1678. 
1680. 
1681. 
1383. 
1684. 
1685. 



1687. 

1688. 
1680. 
1690. 
1608. 
1701. 

1702. 



Jouy, d. of Donold C. 
John, s. of Johu C. 
John, s. of Donold C. 
Patt : s. of Thomas 0. 
Hugh, s. of Philip C. 
Wm., s. of Gubbon C. 
Margt. C, d. of Thomas C. 
Amy 0., d. of John C. 
Margt. Crayne, d. of Gubbon C. 
Ann, d of Ffinlo C. 
Wm., s. of Thomas C. 
John, s. of Thomas C. 
Jouy, d. of Gilbert 0. 
Catherine, d. of Phinlo C. 
John, s. of Thomas C. 
Ellin, d. of James C. 
Margt., d of Thomas C. 
Margt., d. of Thomas 0. 
Jane, d. of Wm. C. 
Wm., s. of John C. 
Ellin, d. of Johu C. 
Thos : s. of Tho4 : de Ballabegg. 
Nicholas, s. of John de Dol- 

laugh. 
Ann, d. of Thos. de Glaick. 
Ellin, d of Hugh C. 
Dollin, s. of John C. 
Alice, d. of Thomas C. 
Margaret, d of John C. 
Robert, s. of John C. 
Thomas, s. of Patrick C. 
John, s. of Finlo C. 
Thomas, s. of Tnomas C. 
Alice, d. of John 0. 
Ann, d. of John C. 
Pattriok, s. of Thomas C. 
Wm , s. of Thos : de Ballabegg. 
Wm., s. of Thos ■ de Ballabegg. 
Margt., d of John C. 
Thos: and Margt. (twynes) s. 

and d. of John C. 
Amy, d. of John 0. 
Margaret, d. of Wm. C. 
Ffinlo, s. of Diniell C. 
Patt : Crane, s. of Thos : C. 
Win., s. of Daniell 0. 
John, s. to Nicholas C. 
Pattrick, s. of John C. 
Wm.,s. of Thos: C 
Wm., s. of Nicho: C. 
Margt., d of Danl. C. 
Margt., d. of Ffinlo C. 
Ann, d. of Danl. C 
Thos., s. of Wm. C. (Glaick). 
Patt : b. of Wm and Margt. C. 
Danl , s. of Thos : of Dollagh. 
Mary, d. of John C. (Curragh). 
Isabel, d. of Wm. C. (Ballabeg). 
Phillip, s. of Win. C. (Glaick). 



1703 Ffinlo, s. of Ffinlo C . (Carmodil ). 

1704. Mary, d. of Thos : C. (Uollaugh). 

1705. Dorothy, d. of H'ni.C. (Ballabeg). 

1706. Thos : s. of Thos : C (Dollough). 

1707. Alice, d. of Wm. C. (Glaick). 
Wm., s. of Wm. C (Ballabeg). 
Thos : s. of John C. 

1710. Barbara, d. of John C. and 

Nelly Harrison. 

1711. John, s. of John and Nelly H. 

1712. John, s. of Ffinlo of Carmodil. 
Alice, d. of John C. (Dollough). 

1713. Thos : s. of Wm. C. of Balia- 

b-g. 
Jno : s. of Wm. C. of the Gill. 

1715. Jouey, of Jno. C. of Dollough- 

beg. 
Wm. , s. of Wm C. (Weaver). 

1716. Margt. , d. of Ffinlo C. Carniid- 

dle. 

1717. Philip, s. of Wm. C. (Weaver). 

1718. Margt , d of Johu C. (Dollough- 

beg). 
Thos., s. of Patk. (Dolloughbeg) 
and Jaue Harrison. 

1719. Danl., s. of Wm C. (Weaver). 
Ii20. John, s. of John C. (Dollough- 
beg). 

Mary, d. of Pat. C. and Jane 
Harrison. 

1722. Jouey, d. of Win. C. (Weaver. ) 
Elinor, d. of Pat. C. and Jane 

Hn. 

1723. Mary, d. of John C. (Dollough). 

1724. Jane, d. of Wm. C. 

1725. Margt., d. of Patk. and Jane 

H u. 
Isabel, d. of John C. (Dollough- 
beg). 

1726. Nicholas, s. of Wm. C.(Weaver). 
Wm., s. of Thos : C. of Glaick. 

1727. Jane, d of Patrick C. 

1728. Wm., s. of Patk. C. (Glover). 
Thos , s. of Thos. C. (Glaick). 

1729. Thos., s. of Johu C. aud Isabel 

Killip. 

1730. John, s. of John C. 
Nicholas, s. of Wm. C. 
Cath.,d. of Wm. C. 

1734. Philip, s. of Thos. C. 
Elinor, d. of Danl. C. 
Patrick, s. of Thos. C. 

1735. Christian, d. of Thos. (Glaick). 

1736. Mary.d. of Danl. C. 
1738. Thos., s. of Thos. C. 

Danl., s. of Thos. C. 
1738. Edwd.,s. of John C. 
1741. Philip, s. of Thos. C. 

Margt., d. of John C. 



m 



AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 



1743. John C, s. of Wm. C. (Miller 

of Squeeu ). 
Jane C, d of Thos. C. (Carmo- 
dil). 

1744. Win. C , s. of Wm. C. (Miller). 
17u'i. Oath 0., <1. of John Voar 

Philip, s. of John C. (Oastel 
Lough). 

1754. D.ml., B. of Philip C. 

Thos., s. of Win. C.(Squeen Mill) 
Jane, d of John C.(Dollough- 
beg) 

1755. Cath., d. of John C. (Weaver). 

1756. John. s. of Philip C. 

Philip, s. of IV m. 0. of Squeen. 
Thos., s. of Thos. C. (Glaick). 

1758. Ann, d of John C. (Weaver) 

1759. Henry, s. of Philip C. (Tailor). 
Cath., d. of Thos C. (Glaick). 

1760. Isabel, d. of John C. (Dollough- 

beg). 

1761. Thos., s. of Thos. C. (Glaick) 
John, s. of John C. (Kiarlane) 
Philip, s. of Philip and Isabel 0. 

1765. Thos., s. of John C. and Bahu 

Kueale. 

1766. Nicholas, s. of John 0. and Bahu 

Kueale. 

1767. Nicholas, s Philip and Isabel C 

1768. Thos., s. of John C. (Dollough- 

beg). 
Win., son of Thos. C. (Glaick) 

1770. Philip, s. of John C. and Bahu 

Kneale. 
Philip, s. of Thos. C. (Glaick). 

1771. Isabel, d. of Philip and Isabel C. 
Thos., s. of Philip C. and Oath. 

Tear 

1772. Ann, d. of John C. and Bahu K. 

1773. Robt., s. of Thos. C. (Glaick). 

1774. Cath.,d. of Philip C. and Cath. 

Tear. 
Danl., s. of John C. (Voast) and 

Bahu. 
Win., s. of Robt. C. and Cath. 

Caine. 
John, s. of John and Margt. C. 

1776. Win., s of John C. and Bahu 

Kneale. 

1777. Thos., s. of John C. and Margt. 

Corlett. 

1778. Eliz'tli, d. of John C. and Bahu 

K. 
1780. James, s. of J. C. and Bahu K. 
Win., s. of John C. and Margt. 
Thos., s. of Robt. C. and Cath. 

Caine. 
Ann, d of Wm C. 
1782. Thos., s. of John and Margt. C. 



1783. Wm., s. of Wm. C. and Ann 

Garret. 

1784. Ann, d. of John C. and Margt. 
Isabel, d. of Robt. C. and Cath. 

Caine. 
Harry, s. of J. C. and Bahu K. 

1785. Robt., s. of John C. and Margt. 

Killey. 

1786. Elizth, d. of Thos. C. and Leti- 

tia Gelling. 
Isabel, d. of Robt. C. and Cath. 
Caine. 

1787. James, s. of John C. and Margt. 

Killey. 
Robt., s. of John C. and Margt. 
Killey. 

1788. James, s. of Wm. C. and Jane 

Hughes. 
Letitia, d. of Thos. C. and Lefi- 
tia Gelling. 

1789. Henry, s ol Danl. C. and Chris- 

tian Corlett. 

1790. Mary, d. of Thos. C. and Letitia 

Gelling. 

1791. Win., s. of Wm. C. and Jane 

Hughes. 

Margt., d. of John C. and Ann 
Cowley. 

Isabel, d. of Danl. C. and Chris- 
tian Corlett. 

1792. Cath , d. of Robt. C. and Cath. 

Cain. 
Elinor, d. of Philip C. and Eliz. 

Killey . 
John, s. of John C. and Ann 

Cowley. 

1793. Jane, d. of Wm. Crane and 

Jane Hughes. 
Thos., 8. of Thos. C. (Glaick). 

1794. Jane, d. of Philip C. and Eliz. 

Killey. 

1795. Harry, s. of Wm. C. and Jane 

Hughes. 
Thos., e. of John C. and Ann 

Cowley. 
Ann, d. of Robt. C. and Cath. 

Cain. 

1797. Wm., s. of Philip C. and Eliz. 

Killey. 
John, s. of Wm. C. and Jane 
Hughes. 

1798. Anne, d. of John C. and Ann 

Cowley. 
Wm., s. of Robt. C. and Cath. 
Cain. 

1799. Margt., d. of Wm. C. and Jane 

Hughes. 

1800. Anne. d. of Philip C. and Eliz. 

Killey. 



THE ISLE OF MAN. 37 

This transcript from the parish records shows 
that in two centuries there were seventeen 
Margarets in the Craine family in Ballaugh, 
and it appears that there has never been 
a time within the memory of man when some 
one bearing that name has not resided there. 
Could the older records be read, they would 
show others of the same name. There was one 
in 1599. The Margaret born in 1791 was Mary 
Clemmer's grandmother. 

The history of the Isle of Man contains many 
narratives of the incursions of the Norsemen in 
the twelfth and earlier centuries. The invaders 
naturally landed on the northerly shores of the 
island and obtained their first and strongest 
foothold there. There is no doubt that the 
name Kneale is of Norse origin. It is a varia- 
tion of Niel or Nigel, and it is a curious fact 
that the latest Runic inscription to be found on 
the island is a memorial cross at Kirk Michael 
bearing the name Nial, which is believed to be 
another form of the same appellation. The 



38 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

name of Craine (always so spelled in the Isle of 
Man) is also thought to have belonged origi- 
nally to the bold sea warriors who descended 
upon the little island from the North, and who 
often made life very terrible for the early Manx- 
men. Whatever they may have been centuries 
ago, their posterity have no reason to complain 
of a lineage which has transmitted so manv 
good and noble qualities and so little that is 
evil or base. The natives of the island are for 
the most part a strong and worthy people, 
among whom religion and education flourish 
and thrift and good habits prevail. They re- 
tain to a large extent the ancient love for 
the sea ; and the sailors who go out from 
the north and west coasts of the Isle of Man 
are the best and manliest seafarers in all the 
world. 

Her visit to the old home in the Isle of Man 
was cut short by the necessity of returning to 
the United States ; but it gave her intensest 
pleasure while it lasted. Had she lived, she 



THE ISLE OF MAN. 39 

would certainly have returned to meet again 
the hearty welcome of the relatives and friends 
whom she found there, and to enjoy for a longer 
season the pleasant scenery and the delightful 
historical associations of the ancient island 
which, while still thoroughly loyal to the Brit- 
ish crown, seems to be wholly free from the 
perturbing political and social problems that 
afflict the greater communities over which her 
British Majesty holds sway. It was the sad 
consciousness of approaching physical prostra- 
tion that caused the blue eyes to fill with tears 
as the steamer bore her away from Douglas 
harbor on an October morning ; and she felt, 
as she saw the place that had suddenly become 
very dear to her sink into the sea, that she could 
never look upon it again. On the deck of the 
steamer she wrote this sonnet : — 

BALLAUGH. 

Home of my mother ! by the shining sea, 

Beauteous Ballaugh ! Far from a stranger shore 
A pilgrim stands by thy deserted door, 



&> 



40 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

Burdened with love and tenderest memory. 
Gone generations, turn ye back to me ! 

Repass the threshold ye crossed long before ! 

The centuried oak ye sowed in years of yore 
Spreads o'er your child its undimmed panoply. 
Glen of Ballaugh ! Thou loveliest sylvan pass 

'Twixt sea and mountain. On thy fern-hung stream 

The moss-grown mill-wheel resteth in a dream j 
The Michaelmas daisy dots the doorway grass ; 

The red-belled fuchsias in tall hedges gleam — 
.Love of caressing seas, farewell. Alas ! 

In the city of Utica, where, as it has been 
stated, the Kneale family settled down in 1827, 
Margaret Kneale was married some ten years 
afterward to Abraham Clemmer, and there 
Mary Clemmer was born and her childhood 
passed. While she was still a young girl the 
family removed, for business reasons, to West- 
, field, Massachusetts. There two of her mother's 
brothers resided, and thenceforth Westfield re- 
mained the family home until after the close 
of the War of the Rebellion. During this 
period other children were born, of whom four 
sisters and two brothers grew to maturity and 
still survive. 



EARLY LIFE IN UTICA. 41 

In Westfielcl was an excellent school, the 
Westfield Academy, where Mary Clemmer 
found the best educational advantages she ever 
enjoyed, and indeed perhaps as good as any 
town or city in the country then afforded. 
That she was a child of remarkable and un- 
usual intelligence, it is needless here to affirm. 
From her earliest school-days she had shown a 
fondness and a capacity for literature, and es- 
pecially for poetry. In' fact, she had begun to 
make rhymes almost as soon as she had learned 
to write, so natural and spontaneous was the 
rhythmical element in her nature. As a child 
she was singularly emotional, sensitive, and re- 
ligious, and capable of exaltation of feeling that, 
it may easily be, was not fully comprehended 
by those around her. But she was always a 
very efficient and practical little girl, neverthe- 
less; and such a natural care-taker was she that, 
in the rapidly growing family with its many 
needs, she from her earliest years shared re- 
sponsibilities that do not generally fall upon 



42 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

girls before they are out of their teens. Doubt- 
less if these responsibilities had been less on- 
erous, and if life had been a less perplexing 
problem, she would not have been hurried in 
her seventeenth year into a relation which she 
little comprehended, and one she was never to 
cease to regret. The following reference to this 
matter, which appears in the article heretofore 
quoted from, undoubtedly expressed her own 
view of it: — 

"While yet a school-girl, with no knowledge of 
actual life, with no desire of her own to impel her 
to the step she took, moved by misfortune that had 
fallen upon her home, she yielded to the wishes and 
the will of others, and was married to a man maivy 
years her senior. All that was spiritually right in 
this relation, called a marriage, was its final legal 
annulment." 

Needless is it to say here that she should have 
been saved from the sorrow and hardship then 
entailed upon her. Needless is it to say that 
the relation should have been terminated ten 
years earlier than it was, in 1874. Needless is 



HER MARRIAGE. 43 

it to attempt to apportion responsibility for what 
she suffered and what she missed. Better is 
it to show how she took up her heavy burden, 
and, growing strong through her suffering and 
her need, carried it with noble courage and 
rarest womanly power while life remained to 
her. It will be quite enough to say that while 
she endeavored to give an outward assent and 
compliance to a relation that never was spirit- - 
ually aught else than an impossibility to her, 
she temporarily resided in Western Massachu- 
setts, in Minnesota, in New York, and, during 
the war, in Harper's Ferry, Virginia ; that she • 
never anywhere found a home that she could 
be allowed permanently to rest in, and that 
years before she finally undertook the entire 
support of herself and her father and mother, in 
1866, she had found it necessary to look forward 
to such a result, and to prepare herself for it. 

If but a limited space is devoted in this 
volume to the early life of Mary Clemmer, or if 
no effort is made to dwell upon mere personal 



44 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

history not necessary to the presentation of the 
character and the achievements of the woman, 
it is only because such a course would have 
been most pleasing to her, and not that there 
is any obligation of reticence or of silence con- 
cerning her career. To avoid giving needless 
pain or offence, but never to avoid the truth 
if the truth need be spoken, was with her an 
all-important rule of conduct. All the main 
conditions of her life were determined by cir- 
cumstances and considerations over which she 
had practically no control. Surrounded from her 
earliest years by many obstacles to s} r stematic 
study and to the highest mental development, 
she overcame them all, and attained to powers 
which she might never have shown if her life 
had been an easy one, and her experience more 
superficial. Not the difficulties in themselves 
that environed her, nor the hardships that bore 
down upon her, but how she surmounted them, 
should be the main object of regard in any just 
estimate of her character. What if it were to 



TRIALS BRAVELY BORNE. 45 

be shown that when the way seemed hardest for 
her she seriously considered whether it were not 
best to take her own lite, and thus end a strug- 
gle in which she felt that spiritual and mental, 
if not physical, existence must in any event be 
sacrificed, — a situation which daily grew more 
intolerable, and from which there seemed 
to be no escape ? She did not take her own 
life, but bravely went on with the struggle. 
That she was able to do this should be a 
message of encouragement and of stimulus to 
other weary and heavy-laden human hearts ; 
and so long as we see how the victory was 
won, it is not necessary to scrutinize all the 
conditions that precipitated the contest. Such 
personal facts relating to her life as have any 
real public interest can be most appropriately 
stated in the subsequent chapters, devoted to 
her personal traits and characteristics, her 
friendships, and her literary work. 



CHAPTER III. 

Personal Traits and Characteristics. — Her Religious 
Life. 

r I "HE portrait of Mary Clemmer which is 
contained in this volume fails, as every 
photographic likeness of her always failed, to 
give that expression of sweetness and of kindly 
feeling that was rarely absent from her coun- 
tenance when in the presence of her friends ; 
but it does convey the strong outlines of the 
head and face, and quite accurately presents 
her admirable and striking figure. It is the 
figure of a woman five feet and six inches in 
height, gracefully proportioned, perfectly devel- 
oped, erect, well poised, full of dignity and 
repose. The strength of her face resided in 
the broad, prominent brow, with the high arches 
over the eyes, indicating great power of per- 



PERSONAL TRAITS. 47 

ception as well as of reflection, and in the eyes 
themselves, which could flame with indignation 
as easily as they could drop gentlest tears of 
sympathy or of distress ; and how readily the 
tears flowed from those blue orbs every friend 
could not help knowing, for they were never 
long withheld. One jarring word from any one 
she cared for always sufficed to precipitate that 
April-like flood of emotion. Such honest, kindly 
blue eyes they were ; and yet they could so 
search and challenge, if once doubt or hostility 
had good reason to exist in her mind. The nose, 
too, was strong, but the round little mouth and 
dimpled chin told less of strength than of the 
shy and sensitive nature that made her one of the 
most feminine of women. Her cheeks and lips 
were rarely destitute of high color, betokening 
her Northern ancestry. Hair of a light brown, 
as soft as the finest silk, and an ear that was 
as perfect as her little hand, which a sculptor 
might have gone into ecstasies over, indicated 
the delicacy of her physical organization. She 



48 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

was, indeed, most liberally endowed with the 
attributes of physical beauty; and to these was 
added a voice that was the very music of her 
gentle and loving spirit, so that no matter how 
often it was heard, its tones always brought a 
fresh charm and a new sense of delight. 

Until the last year of her life she wore always 
the look of abounding and radiant health. Pre- 
vious to the year 1875 there did not live in 
the world a woman more free from the physi- 
cal ills that ordinarily encompass the lives of 
the more delicately organized sex than she 
was. During the subsequent years of pain and 
prostration she still ' w looked" so well that few 
could perceive or realize how much she suf- 
fered. To her, health had always been not 
more a delight than a duty. She would have 
felt sickness to be nothing less than disgraceful. 
Nature had provided her with a perfect physical 
organization, and she deemed it the highest 
obligation she owed to herself and to others to 
protect it and preserve it. Her compassion for 



PERSONAL TRAITS. 49 

the great multitude of feminine beings who go 
through life with an unceasing consciousness of 
their physical weakness and shortcoming was 
deep and abiding ; but she would have looked 
on such weakness in herself as humiliating, if 
not sinful. When not held fast in the clutches 
of acute cerebral pain, she invariably woke in 
the morning to a sense that it was good to live; 
and this joy in living was the key-note of her 
whole existence. Perhaps she never expressed 
her own soul more clearly and beautifully than 
in the concluding paragraph of the chapter 
" Let us Live," in " Men, Women, and Things," 
where she said : — 

" Yes, Swedenborg's doctrine is true. We in our 
lower state are infested with demons. — the demons 
of selfishness, which hold us down from the fulness 
and perfectness of human existence. Yet the soul 
will not be defrauded altogether of its birthright. 
Sometimes it soars and takes possession of its high 
estate. Then you know what it is to be glad to live. 
In some clear dawn, in some still night, in some mo- 
ment of rest, when } T ou possess your soul in peace, 
you realize it all, — the bliss of being, the joy of 



50 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

breathing, the ministiy of light, of color, of odor, 
of sound, the ecstasy of inspiration, the presence of 
God. . . . Every breeze that stirs, every bird that 
sings, eveiy flower that blooms, every moment, with 
its utmost perfect possibility, — is my minister, a 
portion of the universal joy of life. Get thee behind 
me, world, — the world of mean cares, of self-love, 
of petty strifes, of poor ambitions ! Give me that 
which is holy and eternal, — the kind word, the un- 
selfish deed, the care for others in little things, the 
charity that can suffer and yet be kind, the affection 
which, sweetening life and surviving death, is our 
only foretaste of Heaven." 

Of course there could not be such capacity 
for delight in mere being without a correlative 
capacity for suffering ; and her delicate nature 
and sensitive spirit were wounded and hurt by 
a thousand causes which scarcely irritate wo- 
men of a temperament less fine than hers. But 
however she might be hurt for the time, her 
spirits could not long be kept down. There 
was the strong wine of joy in the Norse blood 
that coursed in her veins which revived her soul 
after every disappointment or disaster, which 



PERSONAL TRAITS. 51 

left her never so poor in spirit that she had not 
some residue of happiness and peace to give 
to others. 

How generously she gave of this rich and 
vital sympathy let any friend she ever possessed 
be called to testify ; and not to friends only, 
but to all whose lives came at any time into 
relation with hers, was this fountain of tender 
feeling, of kindness and helpfulness, ever open. 
Her consideration for those about her was as 
constant as it was delightful to experience. She 
understood human nature so thoroughly, and 
had such a keen realization of its limitations and 
of the hardships and obstacles which lie across 
the pathway of most human lives, that she was 
always prepared to make allowance for them, 
and to take the gentle and kindly view of the 
shortcoming, the helplessness, and the failure 
she saw in the world. One thing only she 
would not tolerate or permit excuses to be 
made for under any circumstances. That was 
a lack of truthfulness and of honor. To her, 



52 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

insincerity and untruthfulness were horrible. 
If they appeared in one who was near to her 
in any relation, she suffered intensely. The 
feeling of exasperation which falsehood and de- 
ceit aroused in her was painful in the extreme, 
and could never be wholly removed when once 
it had real cause to exist. She was ready to 
extend unquestioning confidence to her friend, 
and she exacted only good faith and integrity in 
return for the confidence she gave. So strong 
was her natural hostility to anything savoring 
of deception, that she was never able to take 
the slightest pleasure in witnessing the enter- 
tainments of conjurers and masters of sleight 
of hand. Amateur skill in these arts, so amus- 
ing to many persons, was to her wearisome and 
reprehensible. She prayed to be delivered from 
all illusions and from all concealments. Dis- 
honesty was never anything but devilish in her 
sight, and it was in dealing with the small and 
mean subterfuges and pretences of political 
and social life that her writings sometimes 



PERSONAL TRAITS. 53 

seemed too emphatic and exclamatory to those 
who were not aware how impossible it was 
for her to restrain her impetuous and intense 
disapprobation of even the slightest departure 
from what was truthful and just in speech 
and in conduct. 

If there was one power she possessed more 
remarkable than any other it was that of vision. 
Her physical gift in this respect was extraordi- 
nary ; but no more so than that of her spiritual 
insight, which was surpassingly fine and clear. 
She was, indeed, a seer; and whether she gazed 
upon the stars in the sky, the petals of her 
flowers, or the faces of men and women, she 
saw with her marvellously clear and penetrating 
vision much that others could not see. Her 
ability to read thought and character, however 
masked or hidden behind the human counte- 
nance, seemed almost like the power that passes 
b}' the name of "second sight." She rarely 
failed at a first glance to perceive intuitively the 
moral condition and quality of any person who 



54 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

was presented to her ; and this rare power was 
at once a safeguard and a weapon in her posses- 
sion. It enabled her to give an instant welcome 
to moral worth and honest purpose wherever she 
encountered them, and it usually protected her 
from falling into undesirable associations and 
intimacies. She certainly never failed in this 
spiritual discernment of men ; but now and then 
her intense sympathy for women whose lives 
seemed not so happy as her own may have 
blinded her perceptions of them for a moment. 
Certainly if the Evil One, clothed in a human 
form as in a garment, ever managed to steal for 
a little time into her presence, and to simulate 
regard for her in order that he might go away 
and do her an injury, the form in which he dis- 
guised himself was that of one of her own sex. 
In her solicitude for the weak, the erring, the 
unfortunate, she occasionally bestowed her kind- 
ness on persons who were as ready to seek 
to injure her as she was to give counsel and 
comfort to them. Such depravity of nature in 



PERSONAL TRAITS. 55 

women always baffled her. She could not un- 
derstand it, and seemed not to know how to 
deal with it. She was herself so grateful for 
every kind act and word, that she could not 
conceive the absence of such a sentiment in 
others. 

It was impossible for persons who gained 
their first knowledge of her from her writings, 
and especially from her letters on public affairs, 
and who were impressed by the independent 
and fearless spirit, the moral courage displayed 
in them, to realize the sensitive, shrinking, un- 
asseiting nature of the woman who could battle 
valiantly for the rights of others, but seemed 
often incapable of demanding and insisting upon 
her own. She was so utterly destitute of selfish 
feeling that she frequently failed to protect her 
own life and thought from invasions that were 
disastrous, frequently failed to obtain advan- 
tages and enjoyments that were properly her 
own. It is, at this point, of interest to quote 
some words of counsel, as just as they were well 



56 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

meant, which were written to her by her friend 

Alice Cary: — 

" Lastly, m} T dear, let me admonish 3-011 to stand 
more strongly by your own nature. God gave it to 
3-011. For that reason alone 3011 should think well of 
it, and make the most of it. I say this because I 
think that your tender conscience is a little morbid 
as well as tender. You hardly think that you have a 
right to God's best gifts, — to the enjoyment of the 
free air and sunshine. Your little innocent delights 
you constantly buy at a great cost. When 3'ou have 
given the loaf, 3011 hardly think 3-011 have a right to 
the crust. One part of your nature is all the time 
set against the other, and 3011 take the self-sacrificing 
side. I know through what straits 3011 are dragged. 
You could not be selfish if you would, and I would 
not have 3011 so if I could. But I do think 30U 
should compel yourself to live a higher, more expan- 
sive, and expressive life. You are entitled to it. 
There is a cloud all the time between 30U and the 
sun, and even the soulless plants cannot live in the 
shade. I did not intend to write all this ; somehow, 
it seemed to write itself. If I have said more than 
I ought, I pray you pardon me." 

One of the traits which distinguished her was 
her promptness and precision in the keeping 



PERSONAL TRAITS. 57 

of every engagement into which she entered. 
This was natural in one who was so considerate 
of the rights and feelings of others ; but a sense 
of what she owed to herself also made her ever 
regardful of every promised undertaking. It 
, was an essential element in the efficiency of her 
character, and efficient she was in every relation 
of life. She had a keen appreciation of the 
value of time and the peril of procrastination. 
Referring to the habit of putting off the duty of 
to-day till a more convenient season, she wrote, 
in a private letter, in 1880 : — 

" I have suffered so much from the discomfort and 
loss that have come of it — that it makes the reason 
why I am so imperative to have everything done in 
its season. 'If you have anything to do, do it,' is 
the instinctive law of my life. It is the clew to all 
success. There can be neither thrift nor fruition 
without it." 

The efficient spirit that found expression in 
these words was characteristic of her whole life. 
To do well and promptly everything she found 



58 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

to do, and to find some pleasure if she could in 
the doing, was the rule she followed and sought 
to induce others to follow. She counted that 
day lost when she had failed, through any cause, 
to add something to her own thought or to the 
expression of it ; and the highest privilege and 
pleasure she knew was the exercise of her 
intellectual powers. When not incapacitated 
by pain or interrupted by social duties, she 
alwaj's went with gladness to her writing ; and 
her pleasure in that was expressed in her sonnet 
" Work," which ends thus : — 

" crowning bliss ! treasure never bought ! 
All else may perish, thou remainest sweet." 

Her habit was to devote her mornings to her 
writing, but she learned to respond to the de- 
mands of the newspapers she wrote for without 
much regard to hours of labor, and often her 
evenings as well as her mornings found her at 
her writing-desk. She wrote with such facility, 
often it seemed with such inspiration, that her 
composition was very rapid, and she could 



PERSONAL TRAITS. 59 

produce an article filling four columns of her 
favorite newspaper almost at one sitting. Her 
poetry too was produced at times with an ap- 
parent rapidity tjjat was remarkable ; but this 
was because she often found numbers of her 
rhythmical verses complete in her mind before 
she undertook to transcribe them at all. 

It was impossible for a woman with such a 
spirit to be happy without a home of her own ; 
and great was her satisfaction when in 1876 
she was able to install herself in a pleasant man- 
sion near the Capitol in Washington, where her 
father and mother could be with her, and where 
she could rest and work in peace. The house- 
keeping and home-keeping talent was peculiarly 
hers, and household details were never irksome 
to her if she had faithful servants. She was 
prouder of her success in this domestic arena 
than of anything she wrote on public matters ; 
and when she had opportunity she was glad to 
turn aside from the sort of writing that was 
chiefly demanded of her, and to discuss the 



60 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

affairs of the household and the domestic circle. 
The processes of the kitchen, so mysterious to 
many ladies, she never permitted to pass from 
beyond her knowledge and control ; and her 
own punctuality and efficiency were infused 
& into everything that pertained to her home life. 
Nor was she lacking in any of the qualities that 
belong to refined and charming womanhood. 
Her taste in dress and in all matters of personal 
and household adornment was admirable. Her 
sensibility to color was especially delicate. She 
loved to surround herself with pictures and 
with flowers ; indeed, the latter seemed to be 
almost as essential to her as the air she breathed, 
and she was rarely without them. She liked 
to tend them as they grew, and they seemed 
to grow faster for her than for others' tending. 
Her knowledge of them was extensive, and 
she liked to increase it. Among wild flowers 
she fancied above all others the golden-rod, 
which suggested one of her poems, while of 
the cultivated flowers, the rose was always her 



HER RELIGIOUS LIFE. 61 

favorite ; and the little rose-tree that blooms all 
summer by the head of her grave in Rock 
Creek churchyard was set out by her own 
hand. 

The religious experience of Mary Clemmer is 
a subject upon which much might be written, 
yet of which much need not be written. A life 
that was all devotion to others, that was guided 
and pervaded by the loftiest sense of duty and 
the finest conscientiousness in all its course from 
first to last, could not be other than a religious 
life. Her spirit, under favoring circumstances, 
could have adapted itself readily to the se- 
cluded career of a religious sisterhood. In her 
girlhood she passed through a period of exalta- 
tion not uncommon to young women of very 
fine spiritual organization. It would have been 
most natural and proper that she should at 
this time have become a communicant in that 
church into which her mother was baptized in 
Peel, and to which she always felt that she be- 
longed ; but circumstances then rendered such 



62 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

a connection impossible, and it was not until 
long afterward that, kneeling at the chancel of 
old St. John's, in Washington, she received from 
good Bishop Pinkney the rite of baptism as a 
member of that church. It was wholly the re- 
sult of the inexorable conditions of her life 
that she did not enter into this, relation at 
an earlier period. Daring many years it hap- 
pened that her most intimate friends and 
associates were attached to other Christian 
denominations, to which she, however, never 
felt herself in any way drawn. For religious 
dogmas she never had any fondness. Not 
what people believed, but what they were and 
what they did was the all-important matter; 
and she saw too deeply into the hearts and 
lives of the men and women about her to at- 
tach much importance to professions of relig- 
ious principles that found no expression in 
conduct, and were unaccompanied by any gen- 
uine growth of the spiritual nature. Nor was it 
strange that the hardships through which she 



HER RELIGIOUS LIFE. 63 

passed snould have made it difficult — yes, al- 
most impossible at times — for her to maintain 
her belief in the goodness of her Heavenly 
Father. She saw and knew too much of human 
existence to make it possible for her to find any 
comfort in the belief that " all is for the best," — 
•that thin blanket of assumption underneath 
which shallow minds seek hiding and shelter 
from the evil and the misfortune that is in the 
world. She knew, however an infinite God 
might regard his human creatures, that fre- 
quently in the lives of men and women every- 
thing is for the worst, and that the noblest spirit 
may be so loaded down with its inheritance of 
toil and sorrow, that only death can bring to 
it relief from the burden of its suffering. She 
knew how much of hardness, of ingratitude, of 
want of comprehension, of want of appreciation, 
the gentlest and kindest soul may encounter in 
the pathway of loyalest and bravest service ; 
yet she never wholly lost faith, and in her later 
years it was greatly renewed and refreshed by 



64 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

her religious associations. Much spiritual help 
came to her from a sermon preached in Trinity 
Church, Boston, from the text, " Lord, I believe ; 
help thou mine unbelief," which rendered the 
assumption of religious vows a less difficult, 
although not less serious matter than it had 
before seemed to her. A number of her re- 
ligious poems written about this time reflect the 
new joy that came to her with a strengthening 
of her faith. One of them, called " The Mes- 
sage," ends thus: — 

" Lo ! I believe. No day is ever long, 

No life-task tiresome in my happy hand; 
A deeper note trembles within my song, 

Scarce may the listening angels understand : 
The while I sing the heart in me grows strong. 

" Dear, tiny trust ! with what a tender care 
I love and nourish thee this mortal hour ; 

Sure, further on, from thee, supernal, fair, 

I '11 see evolve faith's full, consummate flower, 

Mine own, dear Lord, before thy face to wear." 

She did not longer seek to fathom the mys- 
teries of God's ways in the world, but rested 



HER RELIGIOUS LIFE. 65 

her whole religious life on the commands and 
the example of the Christ whose humble and 
faithful follower she sought to be. Her trust 
was simple and earnest as that of any child, and 
beautifully crowned a life of absolute fidelity 
to Christian principles, which could not have 
been made more truly Christlike by earlier pro- 
fessions of belief in the dogmas of any religious 
sect. 



M 



CHAPTER IV. 

Her Work in Literature and Journalism. 

ARY CLEMMER was but little more 
than twenty years of age when the talent 
she had manifested from her earliest } r ears, as a 
writer, was called into active use in order that 
she might provide for herself and for those who 
looked to her as a chief support. She was but 
little older when the whole responsibility for her 
own maintenance and that of her father and 
mother fell upon her; and that responsibility she 
carried in greater or less degree until the last 
year of her life. Her first work for which she 
was remunerated consisted of letters to news- 
papers; and probably the very first thing of 
that sort she ever did was for the columns of 
the Utica " Herald," while she was still in her 
" teens," and in the city of New York. But 



HER WORK IN LITERATURE. 67 

this was not by any means her first appearance 
in print. While a girl in school at Westfield 
her poetry had found its way into the Spring- 
field " Republican " and some other papers. The 
attention of Mr. Samuel Bowles was very early 
drawn to her literary talent, and, always glad to 
welcome young writers, he gave her encourage- 
ment. This encouragement she greatly needed, 
for she was naturally timid, and extremely 
sensitive to criticism from any quarter. Her 
timidity and sensitiveness in regard to what she 
wrote never left her, even when her extensive 
knowledge of the world and her unbounded 
moral courage seemed to have made her the 
most fearless of commentators on the character 
and acts of men in public life. She had formed 
as a school-girl a strong liking for the published 
writings of Alice Cary, especially for her poetry ; 
and when she went to New York she readily 
found her way to the home and the heart of 
that noble woman. There was a mental and 
spiritual kinship between Alice Cary and Mary 



a 



68 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

Clemmer that united them in the strongest 

bonds of sympathy and affection. What this 

relationship was to the latter, a passage from 

her " Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Gary " thus 

describes : — 

"For her sake let me say what, as a woman, she 
could he and was to another. She found me with 
habits of thought and of action unformed, and with 
nearly all the life of womanhood before me. She 
taught me self-help, courage, and faith. She showed 
me how I might help myself and help others. Wher- 
ever I went, I carried with me her love as a treasure 
and a staff. How man}' times I leaned upon it and 
grew strong ! It never fell from me. It never failed 
me. No matter how life might serve me, I believed, 
without a doubt, that her friendship would never fail 
me ; and it never did. If I faltered, she would 
believe in me no less. If I fell, her hand would be 
the first outstretched to lift me up. All the world 
might forsake me ; jet would not she. I might be- 
come an outcast ; 3 T et no less would I find in her a 
shelter and a friend. Yet, saying this, I have not 
said, and have no power to sa}', what, as a soul, I 
owe to her." 

The home of the Carys in Clinton Place was 
a meeting-place for many of the brilliant and 



HER WORK IN LITERATURE. 69 

distinguished men and women who were devoted 
to literature and journalism in the metropolis. 
She began her writing for the press by describ- 
ing this life as she saw it and mingled in it; and 
the brightness and freshness of her descriptions 
at once attracted attention. The " New York 
Letter," which has since become a feature of 
thousands of newspapers throughout the coun- 
try, was then a novelty. A writer who could 
portray the notable people of the leading city 
as they met and conversed at the Caiy recep- 
tions was an acquisition to any paper. Her 
letters, which were full of vivid and entertaining 
description, speedily became an attractive fea- 
ture of the journals in which they appeared, 
and she soon came to know that anything she 
might write would always be welcomed in a 
number of editorial sanctums. 

Having thus, before she had reached the age 
of twenty, become used to the appearance of 
her poems and letters in print, and found that 
what she wrote evoked a certain sympathetic 



70 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

response in the minds of numbers of readers, 
and having become well acquainted with many 
writers who had won fame and pecuniary re- 
ward, her ambition to do more and better work 
was stimulated, and she continued her literary 
efforts. To undertake a novel was an idea that 
soon presented itself to her mind ; and accord- 
ingly she devoted considerable time, just before 
the outbreak of the war, to writing " Victoire," 
a work of which some of her friends will per- 
haps now hear for the first time. It was pub- 
lished in the year 1864 by Carleton, and shared 
the fate of many " first novels," reaching a com- 
paratively small number of readers, but showing 
clearly the talent and the promise of the writer. 
The story is plainly overburdened with spirit- 
ual and religious emotion. It is not difficult 
to perceive that life has already proved a very 
hard and baffling problem to the author, who is 
nevertheless trying to make the most and best 
of it. Her loneliness of spirit is revealed in 
every chapter. There are many strong passages 



HER WORK IN LITERATURE. 71 

in the story ; but probably its chief value was 
the experience which she gained in writing 
it, and the kindly and helpful criticism it 
evoked. This was precisely what she needed. 
She had not received during her girlhood the 
full measure of educational training and of 
mental discipline that should have been hers, 
nor did she have, until she met the Carys, the 
advantages of intellectual companionship which 
she greatly needed. She had been a voracious 
reader of books, especially of history, and of 
English and French memoirs ; but the early 
marriage and the subsequent vicissitudes of 
her life deprived her of opportunity for sys- 
tematic study and intellectual discipline that 
would have been of the highest value to her, 
and must have added greatly to the merit of 
her earlier literary work. 

Very early in the war period circumstances not 
within her own control made it necessary for her 
to go to Washington. But this was not until 
after she had become completely acquainted 



72 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

with the horrors of the war, — an experience 
gained during a residence of several months 
at Harper's Ferry, where she had been an eye- 
witness of the surrender of the Union forces 
under Miles. She was for a time a prisoner 
in the hands of the Rebels, and was afterward 
allowed to re-enter the Union lines, but under 
circumstances of great anxiety and hardship. 
The events that occurred at Harper's Ferry in 
the autumn of 1862 were among the most pain- 
ful of the whole war for patriotic citizens to 
contemplate. To the sensitive young woman, 
who had spent most of her girlhood in peaceful 
Western Massachusetts, the sights and sounds 
of that sharp conflict were terrible indeed. She 
described what she saw and endured at that 
time in a series of letters that were afterward 
incorporated in her novel, "Eirene." The bom- 
bardment and the surrender of Harper's Ferry 
were the most exciting and memorable experi- 
ences of her life. How intensely her feelings 
were stirred is shown in her description of what 



HER WORK IN LITERATURE. 73 

she deemed an unnecessary slaughter and a dis- 
graceful surrender, which is quoted in part in a 
subsequent chapter. Before and after the fight 
at Harper's Ferry she had much experience in 
the army hospitals ; and the heroism and suffer- 
ing which she beheld there greatly affected her. 
A part of the winter of 1862-1863 she passed 
in Washington, and at that time made the 
acquaintance of man}^ persons whose friendship 
she retained as long as she lived. Here her 
work in the hospitals was continued, and her 
familiarity with the incidents of the dreadful 
conflict was increased. The years 1862 and 
1863 were to her a time of much mental dis- 
quietude as well as of physical discomfort. In 
a letter to Senator Morrill, of Vermont, written 
in June, 1863, she says : — 

"Before Mrs. Morrill's letter was in the envelope 
a doubly pleasant interruption came at once in the 

form of and a forwarded letter from 

you sent to me in Washington. I held it in my 
hand while my friend with great eloquence did his 
best to convince me that though the ' Government 



:" 



74 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

is imbecile,' ' Lincoln weak,' and ' Seward wicked/ 
this war is working out the regeneration and pacifi- 
cation of the countiy. I was willing to be convinced, 
yet was not. With all faith in the people, I have 
none in the men who are conducting this war. WI13* 
do they live unpunished while the land runs in blood 
and the darlings of our hearthstones are the lambs of 
sacrifice? . . . An old physician here says that I 
must cease going upstairs, that I must banish all 
thought of the seashore and go to the mountains. 
This makes me think of the Green Hills of Vermont, 
that I never saw ; of the friends I love, in their 
peaceful home ; and of the assurance, so sponta- 
neous^ given, that there is a chamber in the wall 
held in reserve for me. To live and take life quietly, 
and to forget that there is a war, now to me seems 
the ultima thule of bliss." 

A letter written from the Gary home in New- 
York, in August, 1863, to another intimate friend 
shows how far she then was from feeling equal 
to either the tasks or the opportunities of her 
life. She was going on a journey southward, 
and she wrote : — 

"You know that I have travelled considerably ; 
and yet, even now, when I must go alone, I cannot 



HER WORK IN LITERATURE. 75 

sleep, and get a blinding headache, — it seems such 
an undertaking to start into the world. l How- 
absurd?' You may well say so. But I can't help 
it. I cannot, and I feel so lonesome. You fear 
that I ' have not as much courage as I had to battle 
with life.' 'To battle' is utterly at variance with 
my constitution of body and soul. I could, I have 
struggled for others; I never could for myself. It 
would be so much easier and better to die. I am 
sorry to find myself so utterly a woman. I wish 
that God had infused a little iron into my fibres. 
I know women strong with iron, piercing with steel. 
Then I should use my head and forget my heart. 
Then I should not disappoint my friends as I now 
do, — doing nothing that tells" 

The utter uncertainty as to where and how 
she was to live, in which she was kept during 
these years, materially increased the mental de- 
pression and the inability to do good work, ex- 
pressed in this letter. What she hoped for and 
expected was a quiet home and freedom from 
pecuniary responsibilities. She had accepted 
the fate which deprived her of the human affec- 
tion she stood in the greatest need of, and the 
devotion and companionship she was so well 



7G AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

fitted to enjoy and appreciate. She would 
have been content to be permitted to go quietly 
about her literary work in the city of New 
York ; and for a few months just before the 
close of the war she cherished the belief that 
she was to have a permanent resting-place in 
a house that had been purchased in Fiftieth 
Street, in that city. Very soon, however, she saw 
this hope vanish, and the year 1865 confronted 
her with the necessity of returning once more 
to Harper's Ferry, the place of bitter memories, 
from whence in a few months she retreated 
once again to Washington, — this time to under- 
take serious and regular work for the " New 
York Independent." 

Her first letter to that paper was written in 
March, 1866, one month before the first anni- 
versary of Lincoln's death, and was designated 
" A Woman's Letter from Washington." This 
continued to be the title of her correspondence 
in that paper as long as she wrote for it. The 
letters speedily attracted general attention, and 



HER WORK IN LITERATURE. 77 

became an interesting and valued feature of 
that popular and successful weekly journal. 
They were quoted in all the principal news- 
papers of the land, and the author of them was 
not long in finding herself the possessor of a 
national reputation as a writer on public affairs 
and events in Washington. Correspondence 
from Washington in the years before 1870 was a 
more important feature of the daily and weekly 
newspaper than it is even to-da} r . The political 
events of the period that included the impeach- 
ment trial of Andrew Johnson and the election 
of General Grant to the Presidency were almost 
as exciting as the battles that determined the 
fortunes of the Union. The leaders in Congress 
were men in whom the public felt an intense 
interest. Social life at the capital was brilliant ; 
and the woman who could brightly describe not 
only political events and political leaders, but 
the social and personal life of the city of Wash- 
ington, was sure of her audience. 

Perhaps it is going too far to say that her 



78 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

letters embrace sufficient material for a political 
history of the period during which she wrote ; 
but it is a safe assertion that no other series of 
Washington articles exists that conveys so bril- 
liant and complete a picture of the political 
and social life of the American capital. Her 
acquaintance with the principal actors in the 
scenes she described was intimate and extensive, 
and her knowledge of the inner forces of poli- 
tics and their workings was such as it is rarelj T 
possible for a woman to possess. Her intense 
patriotism, her hatred of shams, and her desire 
for purity and honor in the business of the 
State made her an unsparing critic of the 
shortcomings of men chosen to serve the peo- 
ple ; but she wrote always with the public wel- 
fare in view, and never from personal or selfish 
motives. She did not aim to be a mere tran- 
scriber and descriher of what she heard and saw 
at the seat of Government, but constantly ap- 
pealed to the reason and the patriotism of her 
readers. Thus her articles were often editorial 



HER WORK IN LITERATURE. 79 

rather than narrative in their character ; they 
were proclamations of her own thought and 
feeling on large questions, rather than reports 
of the acts or the words of others. They were 
not seldom masculine in their power of state- 
ment and of reasoning ; but they were addressed 
not more to men than to women, whose interest 
in public affairs she alwa} r s wished to stimu- 
late, and whose right to exercise an influence 
upon the Government she emphatically asserted. 
Her writings upon public questions and the 
loyal attitude toward her own sex which she 
ever manifested will be more fully set forth in 
a subsequent chapter. 

During the three } r ears from the spring of 
1866 until the spring of 1869 Mary Clemmer 
was in Washington for the greater part of each 
year. In 1869 she entered into an arrangement 
with Mr. Bowen, the proprietor of the " Inde- 
pendent," who had become the owner of the 
Brooklyn " Daily Union," which confined her 
very closely for three years to those papers, and 



80 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

during much of the time to the office of the 
" Union." It was an arrangement that few- 
women would care to attempt or would be able 
to carry out. Its character will be understood 
from the following reference which she made to 
it in a letter to a friend : — 

' ' No woman can grow as a writer unless she 
grows as a thinker. Comparatively few appreciate 
the value of the discipline of trained faculties that 
may come through doing faithfully and well the 
drudgery, so to speak, of intellectual work. . . . 
I once entered into a written contract to write one 
column per day on any subject I was instructed 
to write on, for three years in advance, and at 
the end of that three years I had not for a single 
day failed of fulfilling my task, which included every- 
thing, from book reviews, comments on the Govern- 
ment and public men and affairs, to a common 
advertisement paragraph. You see that I did not 
miss the apprenticeship of literary work. ... It 
was a toilsome time ; but one positive satisfaction I 
feel in looking back is the consciousness of the en- 
tire command it gave me of all im* mental forces. It 
cured me utterly of the mental perversity that waits 
for the inspiration of creative moods to do what is 
necessaiy to be done. No matter how great the 



HER WORK IN LITERATURE. 81 

disinclination, whenever I had anything to do I did 
it, illy sometimes, sometimes better, but / did it, 
the very best I could at that moment. The final 
result was not deterioration in style, but a much 
higher aggregate of forces and of command." 

During the third year of this arrangement 
she received a salary of five thousand dollars, 
probably at that time the largest amount ever 
paid to any woman for one year's services on 
a newspaper. The experience undoubtedly in- 
creased her power as a writer, but it must have 
been a heavy tax upon her vital forces. While 
thus employed she made her home in Cumber- 
land Street, Brooklyn, w r here she kept house 
with her father and mother. In 1872 she 
returned to Washington, and resumed her 
"Woman's Letter" to the "Independent." But 
before doing this she performed what was to 
her a duty of love, in preparing the " Memorial 
of Alice and Phcebe Gary." This work, under- 
taken without prospect of remuneration, and at 
a time when she was mentally weary, was done 



82 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

in a manner that added greatly to her literary 
reputation. Alice Gary had been to her almost 
a foster-mother, and with an exquisitely tender 
affection the debt of love was repaid. The mem- 
ory of the admirable and interesting Phoebe also 
received gentle and just treatment at her hands. 
Her name was thus more closely associated with 
the Gary sisters after their death than it had 
been before. There is one passage in her sketch 
of Alice Cary which is worthy of reproduction 
here, not only for its value as a specimen of 
her literary style, but on account of the facts 
which it calls to mind concerning a lamented 
author : — 

"It was in attempting to deal with more mate- 
rial and cruder forces that Alice Gary failed. In 
the more comprehensive sense, she never learned 
the world. In her novels, attempting to portray the 
faults and passions of men and women, we find her 
rudest work. Her mastery of quaintncss, of fancy, 
of naturalistic beauty penetrated with pathetic long- 
ing, tinged with a clear psychological light, revealing 
the soul of nature and of human life from within, — 
all give to her unaffected utterances an inexpressible 



HER WORK IN LITERATURE. 83 

charm. But the airy touch, the subtle insight, which 
translated into music the nature which she knew, 
stumbled and fell before the conflicting deformity of 
depraved humanity. The dainty imagination, which 
decked her poetic forms with such exquisite grace, 
could not stand in the stead of actual knowledge ; 
usurping its prerogative, it degenerated into carica- 
ture. She held in herself the primal power to por- 
tray human life in its most complex relations and 
most profound significance. She missed the leisure 
and experience which together would have given her 
the mastery of that power. It wrestled with false, 
and sometimes unworthy, material. The sorrows 
and wrongs of woman, the injustice of man, the 
highest possibilities of human nature, — she longed 
to embody them all in the forms of enduring art. 
A life already nearly consumed, sickness, weariness, 
and death said ' No.' Her novels are strong with 
passages of intense feeling. We feel through them 
the surges of a wild, unchained power ; but as broad, 
comprehensive portraitures of human life, as the 
finest exponents of the noble nature from which they 
emanated, they are often unworthy of her." 

There are man}' striking points of similarity 
in the characters of Alice Cary and Mary Clem- 
raer ; and much of what is truest and tenderest 
in the written life of Alice might now be said, 



84 AN AMERICAN -WOMAN. 

with equal truth and equal tenderness, of her 
who wrote it. So also of their literary achieve- 
ments, it may be said that neither one attained 
her greatest success in fiction. With added 
years and larger opportunity both might have 
far surpassed what they accomplished in that 
field of literary effort. Reference has already 
been made to the novel " Eirene, — A Woman's 
Right," the first of her works to attract a con- 
siderable amount of attention. It was written 
during the first busy years of her newspaper 
work, and was in process of publication in 
" Putnam's Monthly Magazine " when that 
periodical suspended publication. It was issued 
in complete form by Putnam in 1871, and 
formed another milestone in her literary career. 
It showed advancing power in the description 
of natural scenes and in analysis of character. 
It was especially strong in its portrayal of 
war-scenes, as noted in a previous chapter. It 
was a story of American life, and the " Liter- 
ary World" spoke of it as "a stoiy which, in 






HER WORK IN LITERATURE. 85 

some respects, deserves to rank among the best 
American novels. Its purpose — to show that 
it is possible for a young woman to make her 
way in the world without sacrificing her wo- 
manly modesty, and without joining the boister- 
ous company of self-styled ' reformers ' — is a 
good one, and its general tone is pure and 
wholesome. . . . The example of its heroine 
will cheer and stimulate many discouraged 
women ; and if her experiences are somewhat 
improbable, the lesson of her discipline is hardly 
the less effective. Regarded as a mere means 
of entertainment, ' Eirene ' is far superior to the 
majority of American novels." 

In 1872 she began her third novel, under an 
engagement with the publishers of " Every 
Saturday," in Boston. The title of this work 
was " His Two Wives." The manner of its 
publication proved highty unfavorable to the 
success of the story, for it was written at the 
end of a telegraph wire, so to speak, and in 
the face of criticisms that would be distracting 



% 



86 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

if not disheartening to any author. Only 
novel-writers of long experience can safely ven- 
ture upon the publication of their works chap- 
ter by chapter, with the printer waiting at the 
door. Had this novel been left in its author's 
hands when complete for revision and for con- 
densation, its value as a literary performance 
and its success would doubtless have been en- 
hanced. Nevertheless, " His Two Wives " was 
not an unsuccessful novel, and it retains its 
copyright value ten years after the first pub- 
lication. A curiously mistaken notion was 
formed by some critics that this book was more 
or less a reflection of the personal life and expe- 
rience of the author, a conclusion for which 
there was never the least justification. The 
story of the estrangement of a woman from her 
husband, of their separation, of his second mar- 
riage, and of the ultimate reunion of the hus- 
band and first wife bore no similarity to any 
circumstances in her own life, nor was she 
ever tempted to draw upon autobiographical 



HER WORK IN LITERATURE. 87 

resources for material to use in the construc- 
tion of her novels. 

It was Mary Clemmer's dearest ambition to 
produce a novel which would completely meet 
the tests of art in fiction-writing. She had 
made much progress with another work which 
promised to reach a higher level of merit and a 
larger circulation than any book she had pro- 
duced ; but the interruptions and the delays 
arising from her physical prostration subse- 
quent to 1878 rendered it impossible for her to 
gratify her own aspiration and the hopes of her 
friends in this regard. The novel upon which 
she was engaged when she was compelled to 
cease all literary effort was more than half 
finished, yet is in too fragmentary a state to 
warrant the publication of any part of it. The 
greatest satisfaction she ever experienced re- 
sulted from the publication of her collected 
poems in 1882 by J. R. Osgood & Co. This 
volume brought her warm and appreciative re- 
sponses from critics whose opinions she cared 



,c? 



88 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

for, and made for her many new friends whose 
sympathetic words found their way to her heart. 
The record of her literary work will not he 
complete without a reference to the book en- 
titled " Ten Years in Washington," which she 
wrote for a subscription firm in Hartford about 
1870, and which had a very large sale. At the 
time of its publication it was quite the best 
book on the city of Washington that had been 
published, and it is still in much demand. It 
should also be mentioned that a volume of the 
poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary was edited 
by her simultaneously with the publication of 
the Memorial, that also being a labor of love ; 
the proceeds of those works went wholly to 
relatives of the Cary sisters. Although Mary 
Clemmer fully understood the value of money, 
yet she was of quite too gentle and generous a 
nature to drive a bargain or even properly to 
guard her own pecuniary interests. If she had 
been less unselfish and more grasping, she might 
have added thousands of dollars to her income. 



HER WORK IN LITERATURE. 89 

But self-sacrificing and unexacting as she was, 
she earned a great deal of money. Her aggre- 
gate receipts from literary and newspaper work 
during the sixteen years from 1866 to 1882 
were little if any less than fifty thousand dollars. 
Had she been able to exert herself during the ten 
years subsequent to 1874 as she did during the 
previous decade, she would have earned at least 
twenty-five thousand dollars more ; for lucrative 
engagements both in literature and journalism 
were constantly proffered to her, and reluctantly 
declined on account of her inability to work as 
she had done during her first years of literary 
activity. 



CHAPTER V. 

Her Friendships. — Personal Relations to Various 
Men and Women. 

TVTARY CLEMMER had a genius for friend- 
ship — and for comradeship. The range 
of her sympathy was so wide, and her whole 
nature so charged with kindly and helpful feel- 
ing, that with men and women of sincere minds 
she readily formed enduring attachments. She 
required in others honesty, candor, good nature, 
and good sense, and when these qualities were 
present the title to her respect and regard was 
easily established. The distinctions based upon 
wealth or any difference of material condition 
did not affect her personal feeling toward those 
whom she deemed morally worthy. To the 
weak, the inferior, the very old, and the very 
young, she was ever compassionate and indul- 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. 91 

gent. Indeed, in the lives of most people she 
saw something to excite sympathy or sorrow, 
and her sensitive heart was constantly wrung 
by the weakness and the failure that she beheld 
in the world. Such a nature naturally drew to 
itself large stores of sympathy and regard from 
others; and as the joint. result of her power of 
personal sympathy and the power of her writing, 
it can be truly said that she had "a host of 
friends." 

If, however, the way was thus open for large 
numbers of persons to call themselves her 
friends, and to be regarded by her as such, the 
number of those who could come into her inner 
personal life was always very small. There 
many would gladly have felt themselves called, 
but few were capable of being chosen. During 
many years her confidence and regard were 
especially sought by men of talent and power, 
who recognized the rare delicacy of her sym- 
pathy and the largeness of her intellectual 
comprehension. With such would-be sharers 



92 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

in her spiritual bounty and mental companion- 
ship she often found herself a sort of mother- 
confessor ; and thus she became the trusted 
counsellor and confidante of not a few, to whom 
it was impossible for her ever to hold any other 
relation. This was equally true of many wo- 
men who sought her. personal confidence and 
love. One result of this wide extension of her 
sympathy was to give her a most remarkable 
knowledge of the lives and characters of men and 
women. Indeed, there probably was no other 
woman in the United States who had (wholly 
without purpose or desire on her own part) 
seen into the very inmost recesses of so many 
hearts and lives as she had. The result of all 
this knowledge was to render it impossible for 
her to cherish illusions in regard to human char- 
acter; but it seemed also to make her only more 
considerate and regardful of the weaknesses and 
the limitations of her fellow-beings. How much 
good she did, through the noble and helpful 
influence she exerted upon the lives of both 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. 93 

men and women about her, can never be told. 
There was a sacredness in many of her friend- 
ships which would render unseemly anything 
more than a general reference to them here. 

Of the intimate personal friendships of her 
life, by far the closest and the most alterative, 
in its influence upon her mind and her career, 
was the relation with Alice Cary. How impor- 
tant this relation was to her has been partially 
set forth in previous chapters. It is so com- 
pletely stated in what she has written of her 
best woman-friend that quotation from that 
volume without comment is quite sufficient to 
furnish all the explanation and the emphasis 
which should be put upon that supreme friend- 
ship here. The similarity in their characters, in 
their tastes, in the conditions of their lives, and 
in their fortunes, as Writers, was remarkable. 
Almost every word of the following passages 
from Mary Clemmer's Memorial of Alice Cary 
is as true of the writer as of the one of whom 
it was written : — 



94 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

' ' As I sit here thinking of her, I realize how 
futile will be any effort of mine to make a memorial 
worthy of my friend. The woman in herself so far 
transcended any work of art that she ever wrought, 
any song (sweet as her songs were) that she ever 
sung, that even to attempt to put into words what 
she was, seems hopeless. Yet it is an act of justice, 
no less than of love, that one who knew her in the 
sanctuary of her life should at least partly lift the 
veil which ever hung between the lovely soul and 
the world, that the women of this land may see more 
clearly the sister whom they have lost, who in what 
she was herself was so much more than in what 
she in mortal weakness was able to do, — at once an 
example and glory to American womanhood. It 
must ever remain a grief to those who knew her and 
loved her best, that such a soul as hers should have 
missed its highest earthly reward ; but if she can 
still live on as an incentive and a friend to those who 
remain, she at least is comforted now for all she 
suffered and all she missed here. 

" The life of one woman who has conquered her 
own spirit, who, alone and unassisted, through the 
mastery of her own will, has wrought out from the 
hardest and most adverse conditions a pure, sweet, 
and noble life, placed herself among the world's 
workers, made her heart and thought felt in ten 
thousand unknown homes, — the life of one such 
woman is worth more to all living women, proves 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. 95 

more for the possibilities of womanhood, for its final 
and finest advancement, its ultimate recognition and 
highest success, than ten thousand theories or elo- 
quent orations on the theme. Such a woman was 
Alice Cary. Mentally and spiritually she was espe- 
cially endowed with the rarest gifts ; but no less the 
lowliest of all her sisters may take on new faith and 
courage from her life. It may not be for you to 
sing till the whole land listens, but it is in your 
power, in a narrower sphere, to emulate the traits 
which brought the best success to her in her wider 
life. 

' ' Many personally impress us with the fact that 
the}' have wrought into the forms of art the very 
best in themselves. Whatever they may have em- 
bodied in form, color, or thought, we are sure that 
it is the most that they have to give, and in giving 
that, the\ T are by so much themselves impoverished. 
In their own souls they hold nothing rarer in reserve. 
The opposite was true of Alice Cary. You could 
not know her without learning that the woman in 
herself was far greater and sweeter than anything 
that she had ever produced. You could not sit by 
her side, listening to the low, slow outflow of her 
thought, without longing that she might yet find the 
condition which would enable her to give it a fuller 
and finer expression than had ever yet been possible. 
You could not feel day by day the blended strength, 
generosit}', charity, and tenderness of the living 



96 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

woman, without longing that a soul so complete 
might yet make an impression on the nation to which 
it was born, that could never fade awa}\ Her most 
powerful trait, the one which seemed the basis of her 
entire character, was her passion for -justice, for in 
its intensity it rose to the height of a passion. Her 
utmost capacity for hate went out toward every form 
of oppression. If she ever seemed overwrought, it 
was for some wrong inflicted on somebody, very 
rarely on herself. She wanted everything, the 
meanest little bug at her feet, to have its chance, all 
the chance of its little life. That this so seldom 
could be, in this distorted world, was the abiding 
grief of her life. Early she ceased to suffer chiefly 
for herself, but to her latest breath she suffered for 
the sorrows of others. Phoebe truly said, 'Consti- 
tuted as she was, it was not possible for her to help 
taking upon herself not only all the sorrows of her 
friends, but in some sense the tribulation and an- 
guish that cometh upon every son and daughter of 
Adam. She was even unto the end planning great 
projects for the benefit of suffering humanity, and 
working with her might to be helpful to those near 
her, and when it seemed impossible that one suffering 
herself such manifold • afflictions could think of the 
needs of others.' 

" It was this measureless capacity to know and 
feel everything that concerns human nature, this 
pity for all, this longing for justice and mercy to the 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. 97 

lowest and the meanest thing that could breathe and 
suffer — this largeness lifting her above all littleness 
— this universality of soul, which made her in her- 
self great as she was tender. Such a soul could not 
fail to feel with deepest intensity every sorrow and 
wrong inflicted upon her own sex. She loved woman 
with a fulness of sympathy and tenderness never 
surpassed. She felt pity for their infirmities and 
pride in their successes, feeling each to be in part 
her own. Believing that in wifehood, motherhood, 
and home woman found her surest and holiest estate, 
all the more for this belief her whole being rebelled 
against the caste in sex which would proscribe the 
development of any individual soul, which would lay 
a single obstacle in the way of a toiling and aspiring 
human being, which would degrade her place in the 
human race, because, with all her aspiration, toil, 
and suffering, she wore the form of woman. Even- 
effort having for its object the help, advancement, 
and full enfranchisement of woman from every form 
of injustice in church, state, education, or at home, 
had her completest sympath}- and co-operation." 

A friend whose death deeply affected her was 
Samuel Bowles. During his last illness she 
was moved to address a poem to him, and it 
was published in the Springfield " Republican " 

7 



©> 



a 



98 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

almost simultaneously with her injury in 1878. 
It appears in her collected poems, page 61. In 
the first letter she wrote after that most unfor- 
tunate accident she thus referred to the dead 
journalist : — 

" That day when one lay senseless just this side of 
the gate that did not open at last for her, a few 
hours later it opened for him who had long been her 
friend. When she returned to a consciousness of 
this life he was no longer in it. He knows all now, 
— the mystery of death and of life ; but how vacant 
seems his special sphere of activity without him. 
There are people who by no possibility of thought 
can be made to seem dead, and Samuel Bowles is 
one of them. His acute intelligence, his salient 
mental contacts, his keen, comprehensive, yet sym- 
pathetic vision, to one who knew them well, can 
never become unknown or even unconscious quali- 
ties. When a very young girl at school, my teacher 
(a man who knew and loved him) sent one of my 
school compositions to Samuel Bowles. He printed 
it in the Springfield ' Republican,' and it was the 
first line of mine ever printed. Had I a daughter, I 
would see that no immature lines of hers were ever 
put into print ; yet all the same I have to thank 
those weak young verses for a friendship as long 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. 99 

as life and stronger than death. Samuel Bowles 
became a mental force in m} T thought, which he will 
remain as long as I have the power to think at all. 
Not that I believed him always right ; but wrong, I 
could honor him more than I could a man of weaker 
perception, of less fearless independence, of less 
personal integrity. I make no attempt now to ana- 
lyze his mental characteristics. In this first utter- 
ance of mine since his passing from us I only lay 
this little blossom of my gratitude upon his honored 
name. ... In his measurement of other minds his 
mental perception was unerring. I have never known 
another man of his power who began to be at once 
as just and as generous to those who yet had all their 
way to make, in whom average e3"es as }'et saw 
nothing. He grew to fame. He fell from health. 
Bearing lance and spear, he fell wounded in the 
thick of the battle. But not till he had grown tired 
of it all, and felt, bravely as he fought, that nothing 
was quite worth the struggle. He passed at mid- 
day, a man old before his time. Yet the greatness 
of his mental sympathy never declined, and the 
greater tenderness of his heart reigned supreme to 
the last." 

Among the relationships which greatly af- 
fected the external conditions of her life her 
long-time friendship with the late Hon. Portus 



i 



100 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

Baxter and his wife, of Vermont, was one of the 
most important. Mr. Baxter was an influential 
and active member of the National House of 
Representatives from the northern district of 
Vermont during the war and for some time af- 
terward. His wife was a woman of much force 
of character and no little executive capacity. 
When Mary Clemmer came to Washington in 
1863 to undertake regular and systematic liter- 
ary and journalistic work, she found in Mr. and 
"* Mrs. Baxter a kindly friendship and protection of 
which she stood in much need. This relation- 
ship subsequently became a very close one, and 
for some years she was regarded almost as one 
of their own children. For a number of seasons 
she resided under the same roof with them in 
Washington, and during several of the summers 
between 1865 and 1874 she spent a good deal 
of time at the family home in Derby Line, Ver- 
mont. Mrs. Baxter died in 1882, her husband 
having passed away some years earlier; and one 
of the kindly tasks that Mary Clemmer was 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. 101 

compelled to leave undone was the preparation 
of a brief memorial of this lady. During the 
war Mrs. Baxter had been very efficient and 
active in ministering to the wounded and sick 
soldiers belonging to her State, and she was 
held in lasting esteem and regard by them. 
In this merciful work at the hospitals and 
camps of the Union Army Mary Clemmer often 
participated when she was in Washington, and 
it was under these circumstances that a strong 
tie was formed between them. When the cher- 
ished prospect of a home of her own seemed to 
vanish from her sight, and nothing remained 
for her bnt to cariw her own burden and to pro- 
vide for those who looked to her for support, 
she found in the home of the Baxters some 
needed rest and a temporary refuge from the 
world that with all its hard conditions often 
seemed about to overwhelm her. Mrs. Baxter 
continued to make her home in Washington 
during the winter seasons after the withdrawal 
of her husband from Congressional life, and until 



102 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

the end of her days. In the social life of the 
capital she was for several years closely identi- 
fied with Mary Clemmer, and to many of their 
friends they sometimes seemed almost like 
mother and daughter. This relationship be- 
came less close, but lost nothing of its friendly 
character, when in 1875 Mary Clemmer deter- 
mined to bring her own father and mother to 
Washington and to establish a home for them 
there. 

A relationship which may with propriety be 
classed among her personal friendships was that 
which existed between her and the publisher 
of the newspaper to which she was for twenty 
years a regular contributor, — Mr. Henry C. 
r >" Bowen. It is due to this gentleman to say that 
while he is a very able, positive, and exact man 
in all business dealings, his treatment of the 
writer of " A Woman's Letter " was that of a 
friend rather than a mere purveyor of valuable 
matter for his thousands of readers. Doubtless 
her contributions to the " Independent " were 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. 103 

worth all that was paid for them, and the re- 
muneration was large , but Mary Clemmer felt, 
and had reason to know, that in the proprietor 
of the " Independent " she had a faithful and 
loyal friend, and she ever regarded him as such. 
It is due to him also to say that what she wrote 
of criticism of public men and comment on pub- 
lic affairs was published as it was written, even 
when the opinions expressed conflicted with the 
editorial course of the newspaper. It would 
have been impossible for her to continue her 
writing had she not been left wholly free to 
say what she thought and felt ; but there were 
times when her letters required courage and a 
disregard of the subscription-list in the home 
office as well as on the part of the woman 
who said her sa} r at the seat of Government. 
The religious newspaper, more than other jour- 
nals, is apt to be pestered by the obstreper- 
ousness of the subscriber who wishes to read 
nothing that does not conform to and confirm 
his own preconceived opinions. 






104 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

It has already been stated that a very warm 
friendship existed between Mary Clemmer and 
the venerable senator from Vermont, Hon. Justin 
S. Morrill, and his family. This began as early 
as 1862, and continued until her death. She 
was often a guest at their house in Strafford, 
Vermont, and in Washington. In her letters to 
the "Independent" she repeatedly paid earnest 
and hearty tribute to the integrity, purity, and 
kindliness of his character; and a part of the 
last article she ever published in the " Inde- 
pendent," written when she was very ill, and 
almost prostrated with the rapidly increasing 
paralysis, was devoted to testifying to her 
regard for him. In it she said : — 

"Senator Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont, and Mrs. 
Morrill issued cards of invitation for April 14, bear- 
ing the dates 1810-1884, marking the birthday and 
age of Senator Morrill. The birthday party of Sen- 
ator Morrill has been an annual event for several 
years. The first one was masqueraded by his per- 
sonal friends, who, uninvited, crowded his house, 
lilling it with flowers, gifts, and blessings. Each 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. 105 

year, since then, Senator Morrill has given a birth- 
day party of his own, bidding his most intimate 
friends, making it one of the most delightful oc- 
currences of the entire social season, an occasion 
which can bring but one sorrowful thought, — that 
each one must make one the less. Senator Morrill 
is not only a typical American, but an American 
senator of the highest type. 

"No senator of the United States moves on the 
even tenor of his way fuller of 3-ears or deserved 
honors than the senior senator from Vermont. Free 
from the angularities and discrepancies which mark 
the manners and scholarship of so many ' self-made ' 
men, Senator Morrill is a self-educated man whom 
the most lavishly dowered may gladly take for an 
example. He has the repose of manner and the 
symmetry of character which many believe to be the 
sole inheritance of an indulgent fortune. When a 
boy, he was placed as a clerk in a country store. 
His long winter evenings, for j-ears, were devoted to 
laborious study. In due time he mastered Greek 
and Latin, and later the higher prizes of classical 
scholarship. At fort}' years of age he retired from 
trade, the possessor of an honorable competency. 
Shortly after, he was elected to Congress, and in 
the House of Representatives and in the Senate has 
served his country consecutively as a legislator ever 
since. His name is associated with some of the 
most important political financial measures ever 



106 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

adopted by Congress, while he is also regarded as 
one of the most scholarly and refined of senators. 
His home, one of the most delightful in Washing- 
ton, is the centre of everything best in our Ameri- 
can home life ; and thus, full of years and full of 
honors, surrounded by devoted friends, one of the 
best of American senators, with mind and hands 
still full of thought and love for his country, he 
is serenely passing on to the higher life and larger 
reward." 

It was thus that Mary Clemmer was wont 
to speak of men in public life whose motives and 
whose acts she respected ; and it was not singu- 
lar that after she had passed away, the friend 
whom she thus vouched for should have con- 
tributed a memorial article to the " Indepen- 
dent," as he did, commenting on her character 
and literary work, and expressing the high de- 
gree of respect which he entertained for her. 

A list of all the public men who were glad 
to call themselves her friends and to enjoy the 
approbation which she so freely gave whenever 
she could find aught to approve in their public 
conduct would be a long one. During his 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. 107 

later years Mr. Sumner manifested a hearty & 
appreciation of some of her articles and often 
conversed with her on public affairs. Vice- 
President Wilson always regarded her pen as 
a most important influence on the side of good 
government and the ascendency of the party of 
which he was a leader. During the years when 
he possessed power and popularity Mr. Colfax 
was glad to be her correspondent, and he always 
endeavored to retain her confidence and respect. 
When at one time in his career General Gar- 
field felt his standing as a public man imperilled, 
he exerted himself strenuously, and gave her 
the most solemn personal assurances of his recti- 
tude, in order not to forfeit the good opinion 
she had entertained of him. His successor tes- 
tified frankly and cordially to his appreciation of 
her just and kindly comments on his course as 
President of the United States. Of course one 
who wrote so plainly and so forcibly of men in 
public life could not always maintain friendly 
relations with all whom she knew. The mere 



108 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

self-seeker in official place who wished only 
for praise in the public press, and that contin- 
ually, was not well qualified even for personal 
acquaintance with her. Occasionally her out- 
spoken condemnation of what she thought to 
be wrong secured for her the active animosity 
of some knave who felt the halter of political 
defeat tightening about his precious neck. But 
she never lost a friend who was worthy to be 
her friend, and whose friendship was really 
established. It was quite marvellous that one 
who spoke out so freely as she did in her letters 
retained the regard of so many persons. It was 
not uncommon for her to remain on very kindly 
terms with women whose husbands or fathers 
she had fearlessly criticised and perhaps se- 
verely castigated for some of their political acts. 
This was possible because every one knew that 
her motives were always good and that she 
wrote only what she felt she must write. When 
she wrote of social matters in Washington she 
always sought to be impersonal, and her descrip- 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. 109 

tions of social contacts were sometimes very 
amusing. The following is from a letter written 
in 1877 : — 

"By and b}- I shall put on my richest robe, my 
prettiest bonnet, my fairest gloves, and sally forth 
to see the world. Aunt Magnificent will see me, and 
sa} T , the first minute she gets the chance, that my 
clothes cost too much for one in my circumstances. 
For her part, she would like to know where I get the 
mono}* to pa}" for them. Some people are so fond 
of dress ! etc. I shall meet Miss Cockatoo, as I 
met her the other da}-. 

"'My dear,' she cries, 'how glad I am to see 
you ! ' 

"From her lips flow these honeyed accents; but 
her eyes are scanning me from top to toe, with the 
measuring look which marks so many women as 
underbred. She is deciding whether the velvet in 
my flounce is ' cotton-backed ; ' whether the lace 
in my jabot is real or a very nice imitation ; whether 
the cut of my overskirt is of- the latest style. As 
she takes the inventory, she exclaims : — 

"'Have you been well this long time? Do 
come and see me. Really, who did cut that over- 
skirt?' 

"I meet Mrs. Pr} T , who sets her eyes upon me 
with a gaze of mysterious significance. 



110 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

" ' Poor child ! Are 3011 happy?' she exclaims, in 
a pathetic quaver. 

" ' Never happier.' 

" Mrs. Pry looks incredulous. 

" 'You look happy, but looks are deceiving,' she 
says, dejectedly. She is ' sure that I have had an 
unfortunate heart affair.' She has talked it over 
separately with every one of her dear five hundred 
friends. She is not going to have her imaginations 
refuted by the comfortable-looking person before 
her. 

" ' Are }'ou sure you are happy? ' she sighs. 

" ' Perfectly sure.' 

" 'I don't believe it,' she cries to Aunt Magnifi- 
cent. ' It 's as plain as day. It 's all put on.' 

"I meet Miss Statesman. I have criticised her 
father as a public man. Miss Statesman fixes upon 
me a look of intense animosity. I rather like her 
for it. What would a daughter be good for who did 
not 'stick up' for her father? The funny part of 
the enraged little nudge she gives me is its contrast 
to her features — that thick crust of self-conceit 
which makes her fancy she punishes me, and makes 
her blind to the fact of my utter amusement. I 
meet the woman who ' hates the woman who 
writes ; ' the woman who ' adores ' the woman 
who writes. I meet the feminine patriot, ready to 
weep for her country: the 'female' politician, who 
talks loud for her candidate ; the fine lady, who 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. Ill 

never lifts her voice ; the vulgar one, who never 
lowers it ; the man of the world, with more money 
and leisure than he knows what to do with (usually 
a European) ; the man of the people, trying to do a 
little ' social duty ' and making very hard work of 
it ; the man who likes to be in the newspapers, and 
the man who is ; mad ' because he has been in them. 
And true and tender hearts I meet, a few, with that 
exquisite tact which is charity, that never intrudes 
on privacies, that never assails the absent, that 
never inspects your clothes, that never probes your 
sensitive bone ; but touches upon all themes — life, 
love, art, poetry, politics, religion — with that keen 
intelligence, that large, fine sympathy which only 
can make conversation an education, an inspiration, 
and a delight. Meet such an one — be it in splen- 
did hall or in the lowliest room — you have found 
the highest societ}'. You find your brief and hur- 
ried clay is long enough for courtes}', for self-com- 
mand, for elegance, and for sweetness. You have 
found your k accurate mate,' and, suddenly, to live 
is delicious." 

These words truly reflect the character of 

the woman who wrote them. As she wrote so 

she lived in the world, and her social relations 

were infused with the spirit here expressed. 

The kindness of her heart was seen in her face. 



112 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

The winning smile, the sympathetic voice and 
manner, the desire to speak of yourself and not 
herself, the kind and cheerful words of greeting 
and farewell, all contributed to make her society 
attractive to those who entered it. Her gen- 
erosity of spirit and the utter frankness and 
openness of her nature, together with her 
spiritual penetration and good sense, rendered 
her conversation charming, especially when with 
strangers, to whom she seemed "always to 
know just what to say." Her power in this 
direction was shown at the Monday receptions, 
when her parlors were crowded with the hetero- 
geneous company of callers who flocked to meet 
her on the day when residents of Capitol Hill 
in Washington are usually accessible to their 
friends. To talk with a hundred people in one 
afternoon, for the most part strangers to each 
other, and often seen then for the first time by 
the hostess, and to say not simply pleasant 
things but the right thing to each, and to send 
all away carrying kind and agreeable feelings, 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. 113 

is a power more often absent from than present 
in the drawing-rooms of the capital. 

One other selection from a letter written 
after the accident in 1878 is of interest because 
it shows what a familiar tone she could use 
in her published correspondence, and explains 
why it was that thousands who never saw her 
thought of her as their friend. 

" Everybody knows now ' for sine' that I am not 
strong-minded. Thus I find myself relieved sud- 
denly of a rather fatiguing reputation. It comforts 
me even now to think that the next time that man 
down in South Carolina who writes me scolding 
letters when I fail to write something that suits him, 
— the next time he is moved to do so he may re- 
frain. ' Poor thing ! ' perhaps he will sa}\ ' What 's 
the use? She is not strong-minded. She jumped 
out of a carriage.' I have come to the conclusion 
that it is well to have something dreadful happen 
occasionally, if it is not so dreadful but that one 
may live through it. You find yourself suddenly 
snatched out of the mighty current of life and 
thrown one side. The single thread of being you 
seemed to hold firmly has slipped from your hand. 
You do not even hold one little thread in this multi- 
form woof of vast life, so swiftly woven. -You are 



114 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

detached and cast aside. The faithful hand that, 
despite all pain, all loss, all grief, never failed you, 
or those it served, lies idle at last. There is no task 
mighty enough to quicken it to toil. It may work 
again some healing day. Nevertheless, this vacant 
hour but foretells that last of inevitable waiting, 
when all endeavor shall lie behind, and, in the hush 
of awful expectancy, you will wait your first glimpse 
of the new heavens and the new earth. In how 
brief a space you learn that you are not necessary, 
that no one is necessary to life. Its vast proces- 
sions move on as surely. Its fateful affairs grow, 
tangle, culminate, shiver into atoms the fates of 
men and of empires. Human experience — birth, 
growth, love, anguish, fruition, failure, death — 
there is room for them all in the brief, brief years 
which measure one little human life. Whoever 
comes, whoever goes, the} T remain the same forever. 
One pulse the less in the mighty respiration — 
what is that? You know what this life, so multi- 
form, so marvellous, is. Whatever it may be to you, 
you are sure that you are nothing to life. You are 
as read} 7 for new relations as if 3'ou had already 
crossed the boundary of the spheres. There comes 
to your door from that outlying world one whom you 
hardly knew, whose life 3'ou never thought touched 
yours at scarcely a single point. Her lips tremble 
with tender speech. Her hands are full of flowers. 
She leaves them with you, with the dew of Heaven 



HER FRIENDSHIPS. 115 

and the fragrance of all the summers filtering from 
their hearts. Men whose paths along the rough high- 
way lead far from yours come with words of honest 
brotherhood, of human sympathy, that you can never 
forget. You find that hearts with utterly different 
fates in human suffering yearn toward each other, 
after all. You accept new possessions. You enter 
into a larger and closer inheritance. Thus some 
day, not very far on, I shall go forth again feeling 
sure that I have taken a new lease upon life, that I . 
have taken a stronger hold upon my kind. I loved 
you always, dear hearts ; but never quite so tenderly 
as I do to-day. Before I begin again, let me whis- 
per to you, to whom I cannot write more nearly, 
whom in this world I never expect to see, that your 
blessed messages from afar mean all that's best to 
me in life. Remember always that as I am yours, 
you are mine." 



CHAPTER VI. 

Love of Country. — Experience during the War. — 
Experience as a Writer on Public Affairs. 

'THHE devotion to justice and regard for the 
truth which pervaded all her thought and 
action found their most spirited and admirable 
development in Mary Clemraer in the love she 
felt for her country. Her patriotism, which 
was naturally a very strong sentiment, was 
greatly intensified by her experiences at Har- 
per's Ferry and Washington during the war, 
and subsequently by her acquaintance with 
public men and affairs at the capital. The pres- 
ervation of the Union through the triumph of the 
armies of the Union was to her, during the 
continuance of the conflict between the North 
and the South, the one grand duty to be per- 
formed. When that duty was done she wished 



LOVE OF COUNTRY. Ill 

to see the government of the restored nation 
administered honestly and decently, in the in- 
terest of the whole people of the United States, 
and not in the interest of a small office-holding 
and office-seeking class. To secure these re- 
sults she used her pen vigorously, fearlessly, 
3 r et always with the wish to be kind as well as 
just in what she wrote. She strove, too, never 
to be unwomanly in her judgments of public 
matters and public men ; but she felt that when 
the welfare of the nation was at stake, it was as 
much a woman's right and duty to speak out 
with frankness and honesty what she felt and 
knew, as it was the right and duty of any man. 
In reviewing the character and force of her 
political writings it should never be forgotten 
that she was present during one of the most 
exciting and unfortunate (for the Union) of 
the battles of the war, and had a personal 
knowledge of what the war meant which was 
possessed by hardly any other woman who 
wrote much on political topics. Her descrip- 



118 ;1A T AMERICAN WOMAN. 

tion of the contest at Harper's Ferry, contained 
in one of the chapters in " Eirene," gives a 
graphic picture of a memorable scene, and of 
her emotions while she observed it: — 

" We had been expecting to hear the Rebel guns 
for a week. From the moment that we learned cer- 
tainly that the Confederates were in possession of 
Frederick, that they had destro^-ed the railroad 
bridge at Monocacy, that t\±ay had entirely sur- 
rounded us, we knew that the}' were only awaiting 
their own convenience to attack Maryland Heights. 
' If we can only keep the Heights,' we said, as we 
looked with anxious eyes to this green fastness 
above us, — ' if we can only keep the Heights, we 
are safe.' We could not forget that Jackson said 
when last here, ' Give me Maryland Heights and I 
will defy the world.' 

" Of what avail would be the force in battle-line 
on Bolivar Heights three miles away,, of the array 
of infantry lining the road to Charlestown, the 
earthworks, the rifle-pits, the batteries, — of what 
avail all, if from the other side Jackson ascended 
Maryland Heights and turned our own guns against 
us? 

" I had just given the boys their breakfast last 
Saturday morning, September 13, when the quick, 
cruel ring of musketry cutting the air made them 



EXPERIENCE DURING THE WAR. 119 

start up in their beds. I ran out upon the hill in 
the rear of the hospital overlooking the town. On 
one side was the Shenandoah bounded by Loudon 
Heights, on the other the Potomac, with the Heights 
of Maryland, — a high, green, precipitous wall tower- 
ing above its opposite shore. 

"Jackson had come, — come to the only spot 
where he could effectually besiege our stronghold. I 
strained my eyes through the blue of that transcen- 
dent morning to the sunlit woods upon the mountain- 
top echoing with death. Volley after volley shiv- 
ered the air, and with it the bodies of men. At 
first the report was far up on the mountain summit, 
then it drew nearer, rattling louder, and I knew 
that the enemy were advancing. I heard their 
dreadful war-cry and caught the flash of their bayo- 
nets piercing the green woods. 

" Suddenly the cry grew fainter, the resounding 
guns seemed muffled in the thicket, and a loud shout 
from the soldiers of the Republic told that they were 
driving back the foe. The sounds of battle palpi- 
tated to and fro, the double line of ba3"onets glanced 
advancing, retreating, while I listened with sus- 
pended breath. The fight on the mountains was to 
decide our fate. Below the artillerists were at work. 
The great guns pointed upward, shells screamed and 
hissed, tearing the green woods, poisoning the pure 
ether with sulphurous smoke. Ambulances began 
to wind down the steep mountain road with their 



120 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

« 

freight of wounded. Many of these brave soldiers 
were so shattered that the} T could only be carried on 
blankets, and the sad procession was swelled by the 
bodies of two of our artillerists shattered to death 
at their guns. 

" Traitors gathered upon the crest of Camp Hill 
to watch the fight ; cravens squatted on stones and 
stood in groups, with their hands in their pockets, 
estimating the probabilities of the battle. 

"'The Yankees can never lick our bo} T s, 't ain't 
no use tryin' ; we Ml get the hill, of course we will. 
Don't our boys go where they have a mind to? 
Didn't they march into Maryland? Who hindered? 
Haven't they walked into Pennsylvania? Yankees 
can't stop them ! ' they said. Beside these creatures 
stood women, watching, trembling for the safety 
of their homes ; little children, frightened by the 
fight ; 3'oung girls, to whom the fortunes of war had 
given temporally abode in this besieged spot ; loyal 
old men, who sat lamenting over the troubles of their 
country. 

" It was just noon when the sudden cessation of 
musketry firing called me away from my work to 
the open window. The batteries were still sending 
shells thick and fast into the woods ; the men at 
their guns seemed as eager as ever, when for the 
first time in my life I doubted the evidence of my 
senses. Without warning the firing suddenly ceased. 
Tents were struck, cannon were spiked and sent 



EXPERIENCE DURING THE WAR. 121 

tumbling down the mountain gorge, bayonets flashed 
out from the woods, long columns of men began 
moving down the mountain defile. Oh, saddest, 
most disgraceful sight of all, — the flag which waved 
from that mountain-top, our signal of freedom and 
hope, thej 7 tore it down ! 

" ' They have given up the mountain ! They have 
given up the mountain ! ' rang from mouth to mouth 
yi every accent of terror, jo} T , and despair. 

"In fifteen minutes Maryland Heights was de- 
serted, dumb. The gleaming tents were prone, the 
exultant banners gone. Far down the mountain- 
side our hurrying hosts were flying from the spot, 
which at the utmost cost of life they should have 
defended. Already the pontoon bridge was black 
with returning thousands. The street was alive 
with the wildest excitement. Men, women, and chil- 
dren were running in every direction, with only one 
sentence on their tongue, — 

' ' ' The Heights are surrendered ! ' 

"Three thousand soldiers were marching back in 
disgrace and defeat. As they came wearily on, they 
heard from every direction, — 

" ' Is this the way you defend us? ' 

"'Do you want women and children killed in their 
homes ? ' 

" From the ranks came one curse, long and deep, 
' If we had not had a traitor for a leader, we should 
not have surrendered ! ' 



122 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

" In less than an hour after, quick and sharp from 
the lower ridge of Maryland Heights sounded the 
enemies' rifles. Their cannon were not reach', but 
they came and fired voile}* after volley down into the 
narrow streets of the town, upon unarmed citizens, 
upon women and children. Thus the Southern chiv- 
alry began their work. We knew that they would 
erect their batteries in the night, that the Sabbath 
morning would dawn with the missiles of death 
pouring down upon us from each side, from both 
mountain-tops. 

" It dawned, that memorable Sabbath morning, 
September 14, 1862, in superlative splendor. Sun- 
shine, balm, and beaut}- suffused the august moun- 
tains and the blue ether which ensphered us. All 
were unheeded while we waited the terrors of the 
da}'. We had lost the Heights. Cowardice or trea- 
son had caused the surrender of our only stronghold 
of defence. All night the enemy had been erecting 
batteries on the hills of Maryland and the heights of 
Loudon. We were surrounded. There was no cor- 
ner of safety for unarmed men, for women or chil- 
dren, or for the sick or wounded. They could do 
nothing but look toward the frowning mountain walls 
uprising on either side and await the storm of fire 
about to burst from their summits. 

" Through that long, azure, golden morning, — a 
morning so absolutely perfect in the blending of its 
elements, in its fusion of fragrance, light, and color, 



EXPERIENCE DURING THE WAR. 123 

that it can never die out of ray consciousness, — I sat 
by this open window making bandages. Directly 
before me across the Shenandoah towered the Lou- 
don Mountain. Where the great trees had fallen 
on its summit I knew the enemy was at work rang- 
ing his batteries. The red flags of our hospitals, 
hoisted high above their chimneys, streamed toward 
this foe, imploring mercy for our sick and wounded 
> ones. The ston}- streets of Camp Hill throbbed with 
unwonted life. Many soldiers were hurrying to and 
from the hillside spring with their black coffee- 
kettles, eager to get their day's supply of fresh 
water before the bombshells grew thicker in the air. 
Man}- strangers, refugees from Marti nsburg and Win- 
chester, paced up and down the street. Citizens at 
the corners discussed the probabilities of the day 
with troubled faces. Young girls and matrons toiled 
up the steep Camp Hill side to our hospital, laden 
with baskets of delicacies, mindful of the suffering 
soldiers and all their fears. Poor contrabands stood 
in groups talking in incoherent terror of Jackson, 
and of the certainty of their being ' cotched and 
sold down South.' In a high yard opposite a com- 
pany of little children were rolling in the grass amid 
the late-blooming flowers, utterly unconscious of the 
impending storm about to burst upon their innocent 
heads. The atmosphere was pierced with the deep 
trill of insect melody. Golden butterflies flickered 
by me on flame-like wings. The thistle-down sailed 



124 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

on through seas of sunshine. The spider spun his 
web in the tree beside my window. The roll of the 
rivers rhymed with the music of the air. Nature 
rested in deep content. The day, serene enough for 
Paradise, murmured, ' Peace.' God, from the benign 
heavens, said, ' It is my Sabbath.' 

" 'Whiz, whir, hiss, roar, bang, crash, smash! ' 
" Helpless men started in their beds. The house 
shook to its foundations. Heaven and earth seemed 
to collapse. The deafening roar rolling back to the 
mountains died in the deeper roar bursting from the 
summits. AH the Rebel batteries opened on us at 
once. Those on Loudon faced us, and our hospitals 
were under their heaviest fire. The shock of the 
tremendous cannon near the house sent me off my 
chair in spite of my aspirations after a sublime 
courage. I am not a hero. I wish I were. It is 
extremely mortifying upon a stupendous occasion to 
find one's self unequal to its sublimity. I was per- 
vaded with horror even more than with fright. The 
profanation of man seemed awful. God's Sabbath, 
the divine repose of Nature, invaded, outraged by the 
impotent fury of men. I am afraid of bombshells. 
I am more afraid of them now than I was before I 
heard or felt their sulphurous current hissing near 
my very head. If there is a sound purely fiendish 
this side of the region of the lost, it is the scream 
and shriek of a bombshell. No matter how many 
tear the air, each demon of a shell persists in a 



EXPERIENCE DURING THE WAR. 125 

diabolical individuality of its own, and refuses to hiss 
or shriek precisely like one of its neighbors. 

" I suffered most through nvy imagination. Each 
dreadful thing that tore the air I thought must burst 
into the room and take off the head of one of my 
boys. They poured into the garden beside us, they 
struck the pavement before us, they tore np the 
earth beneath us, they threw the sacred soil upon 
»the very beds of our wounded, but they did not hit 
us. O futile Rebel shells, what rare restraining angel 
withheld your fire and deadened yam destruction 
beneath the eaves of our lintel ! 

" Two hours! and I had grown so accustomed to 
this unwonted thunder that I was able to go from 
cot to cot as if no battle were going on. Another 
hour, and I had nearly ceased to be conscious of it 
amid the newly wounded, moaning for succor in the 
ward." 

Further on she describes the entrance of the 
Rebel army into Harper's Ferry and the inten- 
sity of her own humiliation as she witnessed 
the sight. Her picture of Stonewall Jackson 
among his men is very well done : — 

"Not half an hour had passed after the surrender 
when the Rebel army entered the town. It was a 
sad, a humiliating, a disgraceful sight. While the 
bombardment lasted hope did not quite die. Help 



126 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

might come ; the last thrill of hope kept us from 
despair. I saw the first mounted ensign pass the 
earthworks which had been guarded so long by 
loyal soldiers. I saw him flaunt aloft the bloody 
stars and bars and the palmetto flag ; I saw him 
drag the banner of the Union in the dust. It was 
a sight that I could not bear. After it came Jack- 
son's entire army. No waving flags, outstretched 
hands, no murmurs of joy, no woman's welcome 
greeted it. 

" The} 7 peered into the windows with curious ej-es, 
— some of these mounted cavaliers, — but the few 
faces that they saw were tear-dimmed ; the bitterest 
tears of a lifetime greeted them in at least one house. 
If I were to live a thousand lives, that moment in 
its poignant consciousness of shame, defeat, degra- 
dation, could never be repeated, — that moment in 
which for the first time I saw the flag of my country 
dragged in the dust of the road, followed bj r a trium- 
phant host, that host my own countrymen. First 
came the cavalry, the ' flower,' the ' chivalry,' the 
aristocracy of the South, spurred and mounted like 
the knights of old, each man in his spirit and person, 
in his dauntless daring, in his insane devotion to one 
idea, repeating the princely crusade of the Middle 
Ages. They look what they are, high-blooded, high- 
bred, infatuated men. Every eye burns with passion. 
Careless, reckless even of life, all that they value 
risked on a single stake, they ask only to win or to 



EXPERIENCE DURING THE WAR. 127 

die. Unlike the infantry, the} r know what they are 
fighting for. They will tell you without the asking. 
' I am fighting for Southern rights, for my home, for 
my niggers.' Their intercourse with those whom they 
consider equals is marked b} T a lavish generosity, a 
courtly courtesy, but to inferiors the}' are supercil- 
ious, tyrannical, and often brutal. They hold a slave 
as scarcely more than a beast, yet thej- rate him 
higher, and would choose him as a personal associate 
sooner than they would a Yankee. 

" After these impartial leaders marched their 
slaves, their white slaves, true serfs, fighting in the 
rear for eternal serfdom, which they are taught to 
believe is Southern rights. On, helter-skelter, crowd- 
ing the street, swarmed a worse than Egyptian 
plague ! Barefooted, half-naked, foul, flouting their 
dirty banners, gazing eagerly about with their 
starved faces, intent only on plunder, and on finding 
something to eat. Thus the deliverers of Maryland, 
regenerators of the nation, entered Harper's Ferry, 
September 15, 1862. 

" While the officers were dashing down the road, 
and the half-naked privates begging at every door, 
General Jackson stood sunning himself, and talking 
with a group of soldiers across the street, — a 
plain man in plain clothes, with an iron face, and 
iron-gray hair. Only by his bearing could he be dis- 
tinguished from his men. He stood as if the com- 
mander of all, marked only by the mysterious insignia 



128 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

of individual presence, by which we know instinc- 
tively the genius from the clown. No golden token 
of rank gleamed on his rusty clothes, none of the 
shining symbols of which, alas ! too many of our 
officers are so ridiculously fond, that they seem 
unconscious how disgraceful is this glitter of vanity. 
They were nowhere visible on old Stonewall's per- 
son. When General Jackson had drunk at the 
pump, and talked at his leisure, he mounted his 
flame-colored horse, and rode down the street at 
the jog of a comfortable farmer carrying a bag of 
meal to mill. 

" As he passed I could not but wonder how man}* 
times he had prayed on Saturday night, before com- 
mencing his hellish Sabbath work. His old servant 
says that ' when massa prays four times in de night, 
he knows de devil '11 be to pay next da}'.' And I 
am very sure that there was a large number of devils 
at work above Harper's Ferry on Sunday, Sep- 
tember 14, 1862." 

Even the tempest and turmoil of battle, how- 
ever, were less harrowing than the sufferings of 
the wounded and dying soldiers which she was 
compelled to witness, and which she did all in 
her power to alleviate. A short time after the 
surrender at Harper's Ferry she wrote : — 



EXPERIENCE DURING THE WAR. 129 

"To me these are the saddest days of the war; 
there is so little alleviation to the awful suffering 
which surrounds me. These men are dying for lack 
of physicians, nurses, and care. If twenty other 
women were as bus}' as I am, preparing broths and 
cordials, walking and watching from morning till 
night, there would not then be enough to care for 
these men. We hear much of the rights of women. 
It seems to me no woman need question her right to 
ask what her work is in days like these. I do all 
that I can, and it is so little. I feel as if I would 
give my very life for these men, and yet I cannot 
save them. I can scarcely look up without seeing 
one carried forth on a stretcher, wrapped in his blue 
overcoat, without a coffin, without a prayer, laid in 
a shallow grave scooped out from among the stones 
on the hill. They die so fast there is scarcely room 
for any more. Their graves reach from the hill-top 
down to the road. Their names are all given to 
me, even when I cannot attend them personalty. 
The most heart-breaking duty comes after they are 
at rest. The vestibule and closets of the little 
Lutheran church standing midway between Bolivar 
and Harper's Ferry, and now filled with wounded, 
are piled with the knapsacks and haversacks of 
dying and dead soldiers. I go to these and open 
them, take out ever}' treasure the}' contain, and with 
a letter send them to the boy who owned them. A 
little drummer-boy died yesterday. I have found 
9 



130 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

his haversack ; it contained a picture of himself, 
taken with his mother when he enlisted. Such a 
rosy boy ! I thought as I looked upon him yester- 
day, wasted and dead, that I was glad that his 
mother could never know how he changed before he 
died. I have sent his last message and all his 
things to her. The eloquence of these worm-eaten, 
mouldy bags cannot be written. Here is a piece 
of stony bread, uneaten, the little paper of coffee, 
the smoked tin cup in which it was boiled over the 
hasty lire on the eve of battle ; here is the letter 
sealed, directed, never sent; here is the letter half 
written, never ended, beginning, ' Dear wife, how 
I want to see you ! ' ' Dear mother, my time is almost 
out ; ' and the rusty pen just as it was laid in the 
half-filled sheet by the brave and loving hand which 
hoped so soon to finish it. Here are scraps of 
patriotic poetry carefully copied on sheets of paper 
tinted red, white, and blue ; here are photographs 
of favorite generals, and photographs of the loved 
ones at home ; here are letters full of heart-breaking 
love and of sobbing loyalty to duty and of holy faith 
and cheer written to them from home ; and here is 
the Testament given him by the woman that loved 
him best. Mother, these are all mementos of brave, 
loving life gone out. The boys who owned them 
will never go back. To one unfamiliar with the 
soldier's life these relics might mean little. To me 
they mean all love, all suffering, all heroism. Deeds 



AS A WRITER ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS. 131 

of valor are no longer dreams gone by. We live in 
knightly clays ; our men are dauntless men. Will 
there ever be one to write the life of the common 
soldier? His blood buys all that we hold dear, — 
country, home, a free government, the endless privi- 
leges of a free people. I ask no higher privilege 
than to serve him living and to honor him in his 
grave." 

This was Mary Clemmer's preparation for 
her work as a writer on public affairs in Wash- 
ington. Was it matter for wonder that during 
all the rest of her life she carried vivid memo- 
ries of what the salvation of the Union had cost 
the people? A philosophical spirit she could 
hardly be expected to show when these memo- 
ries were too keenly revived ; and the Chisholm 
affair in Mississippi in 1877 excited her so that 
she felt impelled to add to the poem which 
she had written for the Fourth of July celebra- 
tion at Woodstock, Connecticut, the following 

liues : — 

" What do we celebrate ? 

Freedom's new birth 1 Elate 
While on the sad East's verge 
The sullen war-waves surge, 



132 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

And lines of battle break 

In blood, ' for Christ's dear sake ' ? 

Our bells of Freedom ring, 

Our songs of Peace we sing; 

And do we dream we hear 

The far, low cry of fear, 

Where in the Southern land, 

The masked, barbaric band, 

Under the covert night, 

Still fight the coward's fight, 

Still strike the assassin's blow, 

Smite childhood, girlhood low ! 

Great Justice ! canst thou see 

Unmoved that such things be ? 

See murderers go free 

Unsought ? Bruised in her grave 

The girl who fought to save 

Brother and sire. She died for man. 

She leads the lofty van 

Of hero women. Lit her name 

With ever-kindling fame. 

Her youth's consummate flower 

Took on the exalted dower 

Of martyrdom. And Death 

And Love put on her crown 

Of high renown. . . . 

Cease, bells of Freedom, cease ! 

Hush, happy songs of Peace ! 

If such things yet may be, 

' Sweet Land of Liberty,' 

In thee, in thee ! 



AS A WRITER ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS. 133 

" On hill -top and in vale 
Lie low our brethren pale, 
June roses on each breast. 
Beloved ! ye are blest ! 
Ye yielded up your breath, 
Ye gave yourselves to death, 
For Freedom's sake. We live 
To see her wounds. We live 
To bind her wounds ; to give 
Life up for her high sake, 
If life she need. We take 
The cross that ye laid down. 
The world may smile or frown. 
We kiss the sacred host, 
We count the priceless cost, 
We swear in holy pain, 
sacrificial slain, 
Ye did not die in vain ! " 

This is very effective both as poetry and poli- 
tics. Fortunately the state of things which it so 
powerfully characterizes is not as prevalent in 
the Southern States as the writer feared it was 
in 1877. Her memories of Harper's Ferry were 
again aroused in 1882, when, sitting at her win- 
dow in Washington, on " Emancipation Day " 
she saw the happy colored people pass on their 
annual holiday : — 



9 



134 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

"But the procession! It was the finest of that 
race, so fond of processions, ever seen in this city; 
Regiment after regiment of the sons of slaves, in 
solid phalanx, marched on, to bugle and drum, in 
the full uniform of the citizen soldier. As four black 
men passed, holding the four corners of a superb 
United States flag, I seemed to see another flag trail- 
ing far off in the past, — the magnificent flag that I 
once saw in Virginia, tied to a horse's tail, drag- 
ging in the mud, thus ignominiously brought into a 
captured town b}' Stonewall Jackson's triumphant 
men. 

' ' ' Here is your United States flag ! ' cried 

the soldier who rode the horse. 

' ' ' Here is our blessed flag ! The flag that has re- 
deemed us and clothed us men,' seemed to say the 
freemen who bore on their trophy to-day. The tri- 
umphal centre of the procession was an immense 
flower-decked car, drawn b} 1, four horses in which 
every State in the Union was represented b} T a black 
girl dressed in white, while high above them all sat 
a living Goddess of Liberty, a beautiful quadroon, 
dressed in white covered with pink rosebuds. Well, 
it was a sight that meant ' more than tongue could 
tell/ in a city where, twenty 3'ears ago, a colored 
woman could not wear a veil on the street without 
its being stripped from her face by a policeman, nor 
a colored man walk the street after nine o'clock at 
night without being dragged to jail." 



AS A WRITER ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS. 135 

The pathway of the independent critic and 
observer in Washington was not a difficult one 
in the years immediately following the war, 
when public opinion in the Northern States was 
kept solidly opposed to the Executive by the un- 
fortunate course of President Johnson. On her 
return to the city in 1872, after the conclusion of 
the editorial engagement in Brooklyn, a differ- 
ent state of things was presented. Dining the 
campaign of that year her sympathies were 
strongly with the party that sustained General 
Grant, although she had during some of her 
occasional visits to the capital in 1871 written 
some powerful words in opposition to the 
course then pursued toward Mr. Sumner and 
Mr. Schurz by their party associates in the 
Senate. The re-election of President Grant was 
followed by the unfortunate Credit Mobilier 
revelation in Congress, which severed so many 
long-time friendships and destroyed so many c 
reputations. Two years later there were devel- 
oped some grave executive scandals, and many 



136 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

abuses in all branches of the Government ser- 
vice were exposed to view. It was impossible 
for an honest writer, with any real interest in 
the affairs of the people, to ignore these public 
wrongs, or to fail to expose and decry them. 
She did not flinch from the plain speaking 
which she felt to be necessary ; and the result 
was, she soon found herself the target for some 
highly abusive communications in the party 
newspapers and from private individuals through 
the mails. These criticisms and attacks she met 
with the following terse declaration of her inde- 
pendence as a writer: — 

"Some of the noblest men and truest friends I 
have ever known are in public life. They do not 
take umbrage or accuse me of ignoble motives, how- 
ever much they may differ from my printed opinions. 
Their self-respect and common sense assure them 
that I never think of them, much less mentally 
accuse them, when I assail the abuses of official 
life. What I do assail, and intend to continue to 
assail, however hopelessly, is official corruption and 
a false estimate of official state and obligation, which 
would build up a preposterous official caste, inimical 



AS A WRITER ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS. 137 

to the dignity of true citizenship, based on money, 
' jobs,' and power, howsoever gotten, instead of the 
personal fitness and high character indispensable to 
the true servant of the State. While I speak at all, 
I shall never cease to denounce the one and to de- 
fend the other. Doing this, I pity the craven who 
out of the smallness of his own nature accuses me 
of bringing to the discussion of public interests 
personal piques and fancies." 

She never flinched from what she felt was her 
duty to herself as a writer and to the public, 
although it was often a severe strain upon her 
nervous forces to publish what she believed 
about public men and political policies. Thus 
she felt that the project for a third re-election 
of General Grant to the Presidency involved 
grave perils to the nation, and she forcibly said 
in one of her letters in 1879: — 

' ' With all the force of m}' will and spirit I am 
against the use of public office, of the trusts of the 
people, for the upbuilding of personal selfishness, for 
the gains of political cupidity. After years of close 
personal observation, of clear personal knowledge of 
the persons of whom I speak, so far as my words 
can reach the people, I warn them — for the sake 



138 ' AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

of their country, for the sake of all that is best and 
dearest in it — against the repetition of such an 
administration as closed March 4, 1877. It may 
take on the name of valor, of world-wide renown, 
of material prosperity, the glamour of poetry, of 
religion even. No matter. All the same it is a 
false god. I warn you against it, and warn }'ou in 
season. I say to every true man, to every true 
woman : So far as you have power, be one to lift 
' the government of the people for the people ' out 
of the low region of personal greed and aggrandize- 
ment ; out of the polluted air of mercenary politics, 
into the pure atmosphere of patriotism and the 
universal good." 

A whole chapter might be made up of selec- 
tions from her letters expressive of her sense of 
the value of integrity in public life and in the 
service of the people. Referring in one letter 
to the attempt of a corrupt man to rebuild his 
political fortunes in Congress, she said : — 

" The greatest failures ever witnessed in the 
House of Representatives have not been intellectual 
failures, but failures in the underlying force of in- 
tegrity, which, after all, is the corner-stone of all 
true government, as well as of all real personal pros- 
perity. The men who have gone down and back 



AS A WRITER ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS. 139 

into the outskirts of obscurity are the men whose 
clouded honor no lustre of talent could restore." 

Again, referring to President Eliot's state- 
ment of reasons why " men of recognized intel- 
lectual ability avoid public life," she wrote : — 

" Nothing could be more disastrous to the welfare 
of a people than the 'foregone conclusion' that its 
laws are to be made and executed bj T men morally 
and mentally inferior. Such men, b}* force of condi- 
tion or circumstance, always have crept and always 
will creep into legislative power ; but never let a 
true patriot acknowledge that the government of his 
country, in its final potentiality, is given over to 
such men. Let every mother teach her son, as did 
the mothers of the Revolution, till it becomes an 
inspiration in his blood, that, first and last, he is to 
love and serve his country, and we shall hear less 
about the ' superior men,' the ' fine gentlemen,' all 
sta3'ing at home, while only ' wire-pullers ' and 
schemers come to Congress. Leaving out all per- 
sonal 'jobs,' ' bills,' and mere extravagances, which 
are bound, in greater or less number, to come up 
before every Congress, when we consider the impor- 
tance of the questions touching the interests and 
happiness of every citizen, the questions concerning 
the currency, tax reform, the rights of women, the 



140 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

advancement of education, the relation of the United 
States to other governments, the integrity of elec- 
tions, what enlightened mind can say that measures 
such as these do not demand in their legislators the 
clearest intelligence, the broadest comprehension, the 
most unflinching integrity, that the most clear-headed 
and cultivated and righteous American citizen can 
bring and consecrate to the public service of his 
country? Upon closer consideration, surely Presi- 
dent Eliot will declare that men of the most ' recog- 
nized intellectual ability ' ma}* find in questions such 
as these, touching the weal of millions of human 
beings, ' a play for the most worthy ambitions' that 
can stir human impulse or impel human will." 

The fact that a brilliant rascal could obtain 
much popular support as a candidate for an im- 
portant office did not deter her from speaking 
the truth about him, provided she felt sure of 
her knowledge. It would have been well for 
her could she have realized that where ninety- 
nine readers approve the sentiments of a writer 
on public affairs and one disapproves them the 
one reader is pretty sure to declare his discon- 
tent, while it is by no means certain that any 



AS A WRITER ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS. 141 

one of the ninety-nine will manifest his ap- 
proval. In 1882 she felt moved to write the 
following semi-personal statement, the force of 
which will be felt by every writer on public 
affairs who has ever undertaken to instruct the 
people concerning men who run for office : — 

" A person with absolutely no ends to serve, per- 
sonal or political, with no pei'sonal hatred or malice 
to wreak on ai^ 7 public man, but who has been so 
placed personally as to come into possession of an 
intimate knowledge of public affairs and of the char- 
acters and acts of public men, writes from that 
knowledge and proof in behalf of truth, in behalf 
of the people, scathing sometimes the favorites, of 
whom by personal observation he knows nothing. 
What is the result? Unreasoning, bitter retort, in 
public and in private. The charity that might say 
you were honestly mistaken is not vouchsafed to 3-011. 
Instead you are accused of the most ignoble motives, 
of ' spite,' of ' envy,' of 'jealousy,' of every incentive 
save that of telling the truth and being an honest 
person. Malice and uncharitableness turn and rend 
you, because you know more of public men than 
they do and have written from 3'our knowledge. 
You have seen the uncertain clay out of which 
has been fashioned the demagogue idol that they 



142 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

deem all gold, and for saying so you are to be 
suppressed. 

"At rare intervals comes an amiable entreaty, 
like one received yesterday, saying : ' Please don't 

criticise too sharply the state of 's favorite 

statesman. It is a serious injunction in all our 
Conventions Instructed for ! ' Whether amia- 
ble or malignant, these communications all have one 
value, the unquestionable proof they give of the 
utter personal ignorance of the writers of the indi- 
vidual character of those whom they write about. 
There is no more thankless task on earth than that 
of writing the simple truth of any political favorite. 
The people who know him personally know him for 
what he really is ; the people who think they know 
him from political accounts always know him, very 
largely, for what he is not. Public men, like others, 
in the final aggregate pass for what they really are. 
But the final summing up is never reached by the 
' public opinion ' manufactured from time to time 
for special ends, by direct appeals to the passions, 
prejudices, emotions, and imaginations of unin- 
formed people, in behalf of some man suddenly set 
up as the political fetich which they are commanded 
to worship. After that, woe to the simple truth- 
teller who speaks of their idol for what he intrin- 
sically is. He rarely convinces anybody, while he 
maddens many and is himself beaten with many 
stripes." 



AS A WRITER ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS. 143 

It will not be possible here to attempt even 
the shortest summary of what she wrote on 
public questions during the eighteen years from 
1866 to 1884 that she spent partly or wholly 
in Washington. Much of what appeared in her 
letters from the capital related to the upper- 
most topic of the hour, whatever it might be, 
and was written to convey an enlightened view 
of a situation which might be wholly changed 
seven or fourteen days later, when another let- 
ter from the same interesting source would 
engross the reader's attention. Her letters were 
very largely of a personal character, giving the 
word a proper implication. She was capable 
of graphically outlining the physiognomy and 
bearing of the men who composed the Gov- 
ernment, but she preferred to write of their acts 
and their merits as servants of the people. She 
would not dabble in what is known as "social 
gossip," and she often felt heartily sorry for 
the deserving workers in a field of newspaper 
effort, which those who are most anxious to 



144 ^liV AMERICAN WOMAN. 

utilize it always affect to despise. On one occa- 
sion, when unusual difficulties were put in the 
way of the presence of the " society reporters " 
at the White House, she said of them : — 

" Their reception in the Executive Mansion re- 
minds me of Madame D'Arb^'s tale of woe con- 
cerning herself and Miss Planta when they went in 
the suite of their Majesties to Mineham. The abject 
chronicler of old Queen Charlotte herself was not 
left more forlorn than is the faithful Jenkins of to- 
day, who, cast into outer darkness, attempts to de- 
pict the present ' state ' of the former master and 
mistress of ' Hardscrabble.' " 

She saw through most of the humbug and 
the absurdity that is incidental to public life in 
Washington, but she was careful also to see all 
that was good and genuine and admirable in it ; 
and her letters are full of kind, tender, and in- 
dulgent comments on men whose careers often 
furnished materials for severe criticism. While 
she spoke her mind freely in regard to the vari- 
ous occupants of the White House during her 
residence in Washington, yet the kind things 



AS A WRITER ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS. 145 

she said of the personal character of the five 
Presidents whom she saw there were all freely 
and gladly said. In many cases her tributes 
to public men after their decease were most 
touching and beautiful. Such was the char- 
acter of her references to Sumner, to Chase, to 
Wilson, to Zachariah Chandler, to Carpenter, 
to Samuel Hooper, to Fernando Wood, to 
Burnside, and to many others that might be 
mentioned. Whatever in their characters and 
careers had proved of service and of value to 
the country she generously recognized and 
praised. She kept always in view the welfare 
of the people who were represented, in passing 
judgment on the success or failure of their Rep- 
resentatives, and was ever ready to utter a paean 
when she felt sure that it was well with the 
Republic. This chapter cannot be more appro- 
priately concluded than by quoting the final 
paragraph of a letter which she wrote on the 
day after the inauguration of the new President 
in 1877: — 

10 



146 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

" I stood in a north window of the Capitol as the 
inaugural procession moved down the hill, back 
toward the White House. 'Sweet, sweet, piercing 
sweet' was the music of the bands, as it came back 
on the airs of spring. What a rhythm there was 
in the marching feet of those many men ! Their 
bayonets flashed, their drums beat, their banners flew, 
as the} 7 moved musically on. Amid them passed an 
open carriage, holding three simple citizens, one of 
them the new President, who had come to his place 
through such struggle and strife. Four da}*s ago 
this scene would have seemed impossible. But 
a little more than a week ago, assassination was 
threatened if this hour came. How low the clouds 
hung ! How deadly was the battle ! Who could 
dream it possible now? To look on this sight is 
enough to make one believe that already things are 
ordered on the best and surest foundations, — that 
peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and 
piety are even now established. For over all, more 
than all, the people have peace and a President. 
Our homes are saved, commerce is unimpeded, in- 
dustry is quickened, the vocations of life go on 
without interruption, and the world has learned 
anew that a republic founded in righteousness and 
preserved b} T free government strikes far below the 
roots of anarch\ T and the storms of human passion ; 
and, though it can be shaken, it will not be de- 
stroyed." 



CHAPTER VII. 

Devotion to the Welfare of Women. — The Suffrage 
and other Questions. 

T TAVING in the previous chapter placed in 
a clear light the strong sentiment of loy- 
alty to her country which ever distinguished 
Mary Clemraer, attention should now be di- 
rected to the work she did for her own sex and 
the opinions she held on some of the questions 
affecting women as citizens, which are pressing 
upon the public attention. Next to the love 
she cherished for her country there was no 
sentiment so powerfully developed in her as 
her sense of what belongs to womanhood, what 
women fail to attain and what they should en- 
deavor to attain. In the matter of the suf- 
frage, it may be said at the outset that she did 
not attach so much importance to the agitation 
for the establishment of the ricrht of women to 



148 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

vote as do some who are no more earnestly 
devoted to the welfare of women than she was. 
She rejected with scorn the idea that a man or 
any number of men can have the abstract right 
to deny to women the power to vote at general 
elections ; but she did not think that by going 
upon a platform and making speeches she could 
do much toward overcoming the public opinion 
which now sanctions such a denial. She re- 
spected the motives of those women who did 
think it their duty to conduct a public move- 
ment in behalf of the suffrage, and never cast 
the slightest obstacle in their pathway. If she 
criticised the proceedings at their conventions, 
it was only with the hope of encouraging the 
wise and sensible leaders and discouraging and 
scattering the foolish or unbalanced would-be 
leaders who often figured at such meetings. 
For such women as Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton, 
and Mrs. Blackwell she always entertained great 
respect, and the feeling seems to have been a 
reciprocal one. 



DEVOTION TO WOMEN. 149 

She was so used to looking at all human 
questions from the view-point of duty rather 
than of right, that she could not do otherwise 
in matters affecting the relations of women to 
the community at large and to themselves. 
Not to ask what women had a right to do but 
what they ought to do, was her way of looking 
at the " woman question," as the subject of 
women's relations to the community at large 
is now designated. She had not a shadow of 
doubt that it was the duty of women to par- 
ticipate in the serious and important affairs of 
the State ; and she believed that the surest and 
quickest way to arrive at this participation was 
for women to fit themselves for it. "I never 
favored anything," she said during her last 
days, " that would tend to make women coarse, 
opinionated, or self-sufficient. I never yet saw 
a woman who I thought could be benefited 
by undertaking the performance of any public 
duty. But I think that there are many public 
duties that might be performed by women to 



150 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

the public advantage." This idea she had 
elaborated in a forcible passage in a political 
letter written as long ago as 1872, in which she 
said : — 

"Let not the most fastidious American woman 
suppose, by using whatever of influence she may 
possess for a political cause which she believes to 
be right, that thereby she in the slightest degree 
compromises the delicacy or dignity of true woman- 
hood. It is the duty of every American woman, 
especially if she be a mother, to possess an intelli- 
gent knowledge of public measures, that she ma\' 
define and defend to her children the principles of 
action and of government which she believes to be 
right. The American woman has a direct and per- 
sonal interest in the administration of public affairs. 
Deprived of the elective franchise, no less she is to 
every intent a citizen. She is as amenable to law ; 
she is as subject to taxes ; she is as much affected in 
her industries, in means of subsistence, in her per- 
sonal happiness, by injustice and impolicy in govern- 
ment, — as is man. Practical opinion daily yields to 
woman what the law refuses her. A man's preju- 
dices may be all arrayed against the very thought 
of women at the polls. No less he personally re- 
spects and honors the intelligent opinion of the 
woman in whom he confides, be she his mother, 



DEVOTION TO WOMEN. 151 

sister, wife, friend, or sweetheart. He is influenced 
by this opinion ; the more thoughtful, well-consid- 
ered, and intelligent it is, the more he is influenced 
and the more he respects it. For this reason, if 
for no other, is it not the duty of every American 
woman to cultivate her intelligence, and as far as 
practicable her knowledge of public men and meas- 
ures, that her personal influence may be intelligently 
on the side of equity and the best government? 
There is not the slightest need to speak to any 
extreme woman or to any women of public promi- 
nence. They will all speak their mind in their 
several ways, and there is not the slightest danger 
of their not being heard. I appeal to the average 
American woman, so patriotic, so clear-headed, so 
warm-hearted, so worthy to be honored and beloved 
wherever she may be, — in school, in shop, by her 
own hearthside. Do not do the injustice to your- 
self to say, because 3-ou have no public vote or 
voice, that you have no influence on public opinion. 
Every one of }'ou helps to make public opinion. 
You make one half of the nation. In perception, 
in patriotism, in devotion to principle, in every 
essential of the highest humanity, 3-011 are quite the 
equal of the other half. WI13 7 do you live dispos- 
sessed of some of the intrinsic rights of human 
nature, the equal birthright of every human creature, 
irrespective of race or sex? It is because you do 
not rise and possess yourself individually of the 



152 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

highest possibility of your being. You are the equal 
companion, the truest friend of man ; not his toy or 
minion. It abides with yourself to sink to the 
lowest or to rise to the highest. It is in the power 
of American women to rise to such a splendor of 
womanhood that by the very glory of their femininity 
they will claim no right in home or state that will 
not be theirs. No civilized man can defraud a men- 
tal or spiritual equal of the smallest right without by 
so much degrading his own manhood. The daj^ is 
fast approaching when no American man can see a 
single legal disability added to the natural burdens 
of woman, his counterpart and friend, without a 
sense of shame. American women, it is for you to 
hasten that day. No man will do it. By so much 
would you delay it could }'ou give your allegiance 
to an attempted party which, while it shouts ' re- 
form,' sneers in your face and ignores your presence 
in the body politic." 

The injustice and wrong inflicted upon women 
ever evoked from her a vigorous protest in her 
published letters. Two of these letters, en- 
titled, " Caste in Sex," form a chapter in the 
volume of her essays and sketches. In another 
letter, after speaking of the presence of women 
at the Capitol, she said : — 



DEVOTION TO WOMEN. 153 

" Personally it does not disturb me when woman, 
in her zeal, demands that which in the ultimate can 
never be hers. Nature is the adjudicator of her own 
forces. Beyond her decision there is no appeal. 
No legislation, no progress, no widening or uplifting 
freedom can annul the primal fiat that set on every 
individual woman the seal of her personal doom. 
Let us calmly confront the truth. There can be no 
equality in a race where half of those who run for 
the prize are unequally and over-heavily weighted. 
What, then, shall be said of the victor who would 
la}* a straw in the path of the woman b} T his side, 
who must toil on to her goal under sore burdens, 
from which he is forever free? 

"The prevailing hindrance to justice to woman 
lies in man's inability to judge women by the simple 
humanity which she shares equally with him. He 
sees, he thinks onlj T of the woman what, as woman, 
he wishes her to be to himself. Every other con- 
sideration concerning her is lost in the overwhelming 
consciousness of her sex. The harm lies not in his 
remembering that she is a woman, but in remembering 
and in caring for nothing else. It is the selfishness 
of sex that has made all the back-lying centuries, 
all the statute-books of earth, all the relations be- 
tween men and women black with injustice. How 
can one half of the human race grow and soar while 
it binds and holds back the other half ? There is 
one force more potent than sex : that is, the Nature 



154 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

bej'ond, above it. Great Nature's immutable, in- 
trinsic laws neither concessive privilege nor oppor- 
tunity can change. 

" Man will go on his victorious way conquering 
material things, proving both his strength and weak- 
ness by his prowess and by his selfishness ; and 
woman must go on loving and serving him, bearing 
and nurturing his children, growing great, as well 
as lovely, most in spiritual things. But here and 
there great women, beside great men, will stand 
forth lonely in the coming centuries, proving by 
their great distinctive gifts, by their exceptional 
work and lives, that the unity of human nature, as 
shown in the endowments granted by God to his 
creatures, is greater than sex, that divides and com- 
bines it. 

" When the human race has gained its highest 
development, man will have ceased to be the small 
schoolmaster and condescending patron that he is 
to-day. Then he will have gained the capacity to 
reverence the humanity of his sister as he now rever- 
ences his own ; then and not till then will the battle 
of might against right end, and fhe caste of sex, the 
most cruel, the most eradicable of all castes on earth, 
cease to make discord and misery between men and 
women." 

In still another letter she indulges in a 
more than usually vigorous form of expres- 



DEVOTION TO WOMEN. 155 

sion. concerning the idiosyncrasies of certain 
women : — 

" I- never had any patience with women who like 
to be considered ' superior to their sex.' If yoxx are 
the woman you should be, 3011 are never ' superior to 
your sex.' I feel a repulsion to the woman who, in 
writing, is always ' lugging in ' something about 
' my sex.' When men write, it rarely occurs to 
them to dilate upon ' my sex.' Then there is a femi- 
nine writer who is always making feeble assertions 
and as feebly fortifying them by the reminder ' If I 
am only a woman.' Only a woman ! If 3011 are 
the woman you should be, you are great in capacity 
to know, to love, to surfer, to live ; great in your 
humanity ; great in all that a creature of God should 
be. It is not half a woman who talks about being 
' only a woman.' If a man is greater than }'ou, it 
is because he is great in human nature, and, not 
ashamed of his sex, never boasts of it. He has 
more cause to be ashamed of it than you have of 
yours. Yet the seal of your servitude is that you 
apologize for being a woman or make a plea because 
you are one. How many centuries must pass before 
woman outlives this fatal acknowledgment, which 
you have caught from the arrogance of men? No 
race can be strong till it is proud of itself, till it 
finds in itself the impulse and the power to be, with- 
out apology and without sufferance." 



156 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

In a gentler mood, and one more truly expres- 
sive of her own nature, Mary Clemmer wrote as 
follows : — 

"There is many a gilded house in Washington 
that with all its lavish decoration is not half the 
home to its inmates that this simple room is to me. 
This tending of the heart inward to one home centre 
is the saviour of its poor human nature. Show me a 
woman and a man who will make a home out of any 
spot where they alight, and you will see two already 
saved from the evil in the world. In this hurrying 
day I pause to magnify this thought. The grandest 
men that I have ever known have needed or longed 
most deeply for a home, or they have lived their larg- 
est, most expansive life in their home. The largest- 
natured women who live find the fulness and sweetness 
of being at home, or they never find it in this life. For 
such as have missed it or lost it no career on earth 
holds an adequate compensation. Now don't say 
I am writing a dissertation on home to fill space. 
Don't, I beg of you, this time say that I mean myself. 
I do not mean myself. I mean the uneasy sisterhood 
beating about me for ' careers.' Some women must 
have careers. These are hard enough for those who 
cannot escape them. Some women are not elected 
to human homes. They are free intelligences. 
They must meet fate and compel it without help. 



SUFFRAGE AND OTHER QUESTIONS. 157 

They are foreordained to their lot. Let them alone. 
Let them be free, as men are free, to work out 
their destiny unchallenged. What fills me with won- 
der is that any woman should want such a lot. The 
well-to-do uneasy woman in pursuit of a career — 
without the remotest idea what it ought to be — is 
an afflicting object in the human race. She does n't 
know what to do with herself, and certainly nobody 
else knows what to do with her. Surely, I shall 
not have the slightest influence with her when I as- 
sure her that the deepest tenet of my faith is that 
the best thing that can happen to an}' woman is to 
be satisfactorily loved, to be taken care of, to be 
made much of, and to make much of the life and 
the love utterly her own in her own home." 

She never participated in any of the organ- 
ized movements to advance the " rights " of 
women, because as a woman she was too timid 
and shy for platform work, because she was 
otherwise very busy, and because she thought she 
could best serve the interests of her sex through 
her pen. In all that she wrote on subjects 
related to woman's advancement and welfare 
nothing will be found that the most conserva- 
tive advocate of the maintenance of the sane- 



158 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

tity of the home and the refinement of the sex 
could properly object to. To be sure she at- 
tacked and combated with all the power she had 
the views of certain religious preachers, among 
whom the Rev. Knox-Little of England is note- 
worthy, whose idea of the advancement of women 
is to make of them a select, inferior, and subject 
class. The manner in which the texts of Saint 
Paul are used to bolster up this idea of the 
inferiority of women, and even of the absolute 
suppression of women as intellectual and re- 
sponsible members of society, was always most 
offensive to her ; and she wished that Saint Paul 
might return to the earth for a little taste of 
modern American life, and thereby obtain some 
fresh and useful ideas which could not be in- 
cessantly cited by wooden-headed opponents of 
progress as an everlasting reason why women 
should remain in the background in all the 
business of the Church and State. 

The writings of Mary Clemmer will be 
searched in vain in the effort to discover any- 



SUFFRAGE AND OTHER QUESTIONS. 159 

thing that did not make for the advancement 
and uplifting of women, or for the refinement 
and embellishment of their lives. She knew — 
none better — that it is the duty of women to 
be charming, no less than to be sincere. She 
sought to be always charming and always sin- 
cere. She knew what grace and beauty may 
accompany the cultivation in woman's soul of 
a lofty religious faith ; but she knew also that 
there may exist the finest spiritual development 
without the public profession of religious beliefs. 
She could see the noble justification for such a 
life as that of George Eliot, and be as just to her 
as she was to TAicretia Mott, of whom she wrote 
so tenderly in the volume of " Famous Women." 
Her letters from Washington show how eagerly 
she seized upon every opportunity to pay the 
tribute of her admiration and her praise to all 
gentle and womanly women with whose lives 
her own came in contact. The underlying 
purpose in all her fiction-writing was to portray 
moral nobleness in women. She rejoiced in 



160 ^V AMERICAN WOMAN. 

every effort made to render the lives of women 
more useful and happy in the world. Being 
invited to deliver the annual address before the 
Washington Training School for Nurses in 1881, 
she prepared an address which was read at 
the Commencement in that year, in which she 
discussed the training and duties of nurses in 
a practical and suggestive manner. She con- 
stantly sought to lighten the burdens that bear 
so heavily upon women's lives, and the sympa- 
thetic spirit of her writings drew to her a great 
company of devoted women in all parts of the 
country, and even in foreign lands. A rich sup- 
ply of affection and gratitude was ever flowing 
in to her from these sources. This began with 
her earliest appearance as a writer, and contin- 
ued in increasing measure until the end. In a 
letter to an intimate friend, written as early as 
June, 1862, she said : — 

" I send you two of my women love-letters, the 

least extravagant of many. I only intended to send 

.you S 's first letter, but could not find it. It 



SUFFRAGE AND OTHER QUESTIONS. 161 

was so sad, so tender, so impassioned that it drew 
tears from Mr. Bowles's eyes. I never showed it 
but to him and one other. No one but myself ever 

read F 's letter. It is the least exaggerated of 

the many she has written me. Of all the women I 
never saw who have written, only these two have 
won me to care for them. Not because of their 
utterly exaggerated ideal of me, — I am humiliated 
to know that I am not what the}' dream, — but be- 
cause their sad lives entitle them to a place in my 
heart. I should be sadder than I am to-night if no 
woman loved me ; if there were no women I could 
love." 

There may have been only two in 1862, but 
the number was soon increased, and a volume 
might be filled with the tender and devoted 
letters which came to her from these loving 
hands. Her success as a writer and the power 
which she displayed as critic and advocate in 
the discussion of public questions secured for 
her the respect of many men who were little 
aware of the real nature of the shy and affec- 
tionate woman whose articles they read ; but 
tender-hearted women rarely failed to discover 

her and to become warmly attached to her. To 
11 



162 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

young women struggling to make their own way 
in the world she was a devoted and tireless 
friend, and the relations she sustained to them 
seemed sometimes to be idyllic in the purity and 
devotedness of the mutual affection. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Love of Nature, expressed in Prose and Poetry. 

" A ^^ s0 ' crow ded with brightness, beauty 
and bloom, passes our Easter season." 
These were the closing words of the last letter 
ever written for publication by Mary Clemmer, 
— a letter that appeared in the " Independent" 
on the 24th day of April, 1884. She had been 
describing, as she often did in her letters, some 
of the aspects of the outer world, and remark- 
ing upon the abrupt change from winter's gloom 
to summer's warmth and brightness that comes 
at Easter time in Washington. She was already 
very ill and weak, but while she continued to 
observe them, her growing weakness only made 
her the more sensitive to natural sounds, colors, 
and atmospheric conditions. In looking over 



164 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

her occasional writings any one will be instantly 
struck by the frequency of the passages in 
which, often in the language of rhapsody, she 
describes her delight in the beauty and the 
glory of Nature. She inherited from her father 
a remarkable fondness for the natural world, a 
nearness in spirit to the moods and phases of 
Nature not unlike that of Thoreau, which is, it 
must be said, extremely unusual in women. She 
had the power of extracting spiritual comfort 
and health from this source when men and wo- 
men failed her. Often when the material facts 
and conditions of life seemed very hard to her, 
she turned her eyes to the blue sky, or to the 
ocean waves, or to flowers blossoming in her 
garden, and was happy in the thought of the 
grandeur and the beauty of the works of God, 
which men may ignore if they blindly will, but 
which by no development of perversity can they 
destroy. This capacity for joy in Nature began 
with her life and always enriched it. It was a 
joy she wished to share with others, like every 



LOVE OF NATURE. 165 

good thing that came into her life. There were 
days in every year of her life which were forever 
memorable to her, simply for this sensuous satis- 
faction that came from their perfect conditions. 
Not the least admirable of her poems is " A 
Perfect Day," beginning: — 

" Go, glorious day ! 

Here, while you pass, I make this sign ; 
Earth, swinging on her sileut way, 

Will hear me hack unto this hour divine, 
And I will softly say, ' Once thou wert mine.' " 

One of the most perfect of her poems, " The 
Mountain Pine," is a fine inspiration of Nature. 
Sitting under the tall tree far above the town, 
this is what happens to her : — 

" Out from the softly woven thread 
Of the brown carpet round me spread, 

Come creatures clean and small ; 
Each happy in its bright, brief day, 
Perfect in every work and way, 

To me it seems to call. 

" It says : ' On the eternal leaf 
The measure of thy day is brief, 
A fragment but as mine. 



166 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

Thou beatest in thy little space, 
Yet cannot more than fill thy place 
Within the plan divine. 

" ' Why chafe within thy narrow range ? 

Why sigh that life must change and change? 

Why weep o'er love's dear cost? 
Thy failure and thy want shall still 
The purpose of thy life fulfil, 

And nothing can be lost. 

u ' The wrong that thou hast borne may give 
Thee strength to help another live ; 

The tear that falls, apart, 
May thrill with human tenderness 
The unconscious word you breathe, to bless 
Some aching human heart.' " 

This poem was written in the Catskill Moun- 
tain region, where she spent a part of the sum- 
mer of 1876. During other summers which 
were spent at Nantucket, Princeton, New Castle, 
and other places she was too much depressed 
by pain to give expression to her delight in 
Nature; but in 1882 she spent some pleasant 
weeks at Intervale, New Hampshire, and there 
she wrote another poem, " Happy Days," which 
is published in her volume, " Poems of Life and 



LOVE OF NATURE. 167 

Nature." In a private letter written there at 
the end of September she described a morning 
ramble thus : — 

" You cannot imagine the delight of the walk we 
had, following a mountain brook up through its 
woody course, thick with moss and fringed all the 
way with exquisite ferns. It was one of Nature's 
own chosen and inviolate fastnesses, yet with a nai'- 
row climbing and winding path through it, through 
which a true worshipper could make a way. If you 
could have seen the cascades that flashed and fell 
down these fern-and-flower-hung rocks into the deep, 
still wells below, you must have felt their inspiration. 
I will not attempt to put into words the charm I 
have found in the mountains this year. It is just 
as if I had never seen them before ; for, for the first 
time, I behold them free from the constant pain that 
would not let me see them. At last I am in deep 
and constant rapport with them. Even Starr King 
did not over-estimate or over-describe the repose, the 
sufficingness of North Conway, especially at Inter- 
vale. It is a dream of beauty. I should be sad 
indeed if I thought I should not come here again, 
and with you." 

In an earlier letter written in the same year 
from Franconia she thus expressed herself : 



168 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

" The Sabbath stillness rests on everything, — still- 
ness, not silence ; for though the loud discords of the 
week are hushed, the air is all astir with Nature's 
sounds. The cricket is crying in the grass ; the 
crows are cawing in the woods ; the dragon-fly is 
droning in the sunlight. The green meadows roll 
away to the mountains, and the mountains, purple 
as amethysts against the azure, look down upon the 
world in peace. The church-bell in Franconia is 
sending its morning call across the hills ; but, un- 
mindful of its call, I am here by my little east- 
looking window, talking with you." 

It was her habit in her published letters to 
give frequent expression to the pleasure which 
she felt in the outer world ; and although she 
ran the* risk of repetition she would not deny 
herself this privilege of saying how beautiful the 
world seemed to her. In the spring of 1879 
she wrote : — 

"May and October are the immortal months in 
verse. I wonder that fuller praise has never been 
sung of the enchantment of April. It is the en- 
chantment of dawning life, of expectancy, of first 
3011th, of immortal promise. It never touches the 
satiety of fulfilment. It never watches the waning 



LOVE OF NATURE. 169 

of prime or the fading of fruitage. It dies, as it 
dawns, in the fulness of expectancy. It is full of 
premonitions, of suggestions, of delicious surprises ; 
of hope, because it is youth. There is an Alpine 
crispness in its breath. So also there are wafts of 
warmth that are full of summer. It brings to the 
earth Nature's first holiday. I recall the apparent, 
pervading youth of the world last Saturday ; the new, 
bright colors that decked the streets ; the very young, 
the very old, everywhere along the way and in the 
parks basking in the sunshine of what seemed to be 
a new earth and a new sky. The tender leafage of 
the world, just breaking into bloom, seemed to flush 
the whole earth with delicate green. Great banks 
of violets purpled the outer edges of the Capitol 
grounds ; wide beds of tulips lifted their gorgeous 
caps into the lavish sunshine. The next morning, 
Sunday, I sat by my window and looked out upon a 
world set not only in Sabbath eilence, but swathed 
in the snow of a sudden winter. The green velvet 
of the lawn was covered with ermine ; the great, 
swelling rosebuds, which the day before promised 
such speedy glory of blossoming, were now cased an 
inch deep in pearl ; the maple-tree beside me, whose 
familiar boughs, bearing the beauty of every season, 
came into my very room ; the Virginia Creeper, 
looping its lovely curtains above my head, — all hung 
their tassels of bloom through the clinging snow. 
Yet it did not look cruel, as it would in a less gentle 



170 AN AMEBIC AN WOMAN. 

air. To-morrow, one was so sure, it would all have 
vanished, leaving grass and blossom the more living 
for its ministry. This is April, — all youth, all sur- 
prise, all promise." 

Here is a picture which was very satisfying 
to her eyes at Easter time : — 

"There is one glimpse on a Washington street 
which I always pause to catch. There could be no 
ill of life or heart to which this glimpse would not 
bring to me a moment's alleviation. It is the little 
Church of St. John, showing its soft brown walls 
through the green vistas of Lafaj-ette Square. It is 
rugged and homely and old ; yet it makes a picture 
that is full of peace. From a distance its spire 
seems to merge into the blue be3ond ; its brown 
ivy-hung walls are toned to harmony ; its approach 
through the Square in summer is balm}*, embowered, 
beautiful with eveiy tint of leaf and bud and bloom. 
Nor in its way is it less satisfactory in the winter, 
when myriads of interlacing branches throw out their 
delicate tracery against the azure of the sk}\ I do 
not care to look upon a fairer sight than St. John's 
in a May sunset, — its walls flashing through the 
shifting emerald of the Square beyond ; the sky a 
sea of unfathomable color, giving that sense of depth 
and distance that draws the soul outward through 
the eyes till it falters at last on the far borders of 



LOVE OF NATURE. 171 

the undefined and dim. In such an hour, at such a 
time, it is a perfect picture. Yet it never looked 
fairer than in the sunshine of last Easter morning. 
The sun of Easter Sabbath seldom shines upon the 
capital through a cloud. The dazzling blue of the 
heaven, the bland atmosphere, the wonderful sun- 
shine which infiltrates its quickening warmth through 
it, all combine to make it the Sabbath of resurrection 
and hope that it is. The turmoil in yonder Capitol 
is still. The Goddess of Libert}', gazing steadfastly 
down through the shining space, sees no busy brood 
of men wrangling at her feet. The viol is hushed. 
The dance is ended. The wild strife for money, 
place, and power seems for a season past. The 
parks, the streets, the avenues are thronged with 
Easter worshippers, — old men and young, matrons, 
maidens, and little children, in gala attire and fair 
as the morning. There was not an empty seat at 
St. John's. It is a small church, not making the 
faintest attempt toward architectural splendor or to 
splendor of any sort. That is why I like it. It is 
utterly without pretence. Yet it is venerable in 
reminiscence." 

In July, 1879, she was moved to say in a pub- 
lic letter : — 

" There is an enchantment in these daj's which 
allures one from all occupation. There are many 



172 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

days in which it is a delight to shut one's eyes on 
the elements, when one is glad to forget the biting 
wind or dreary rain in one's own thoughts or in the 
thoughts of others. But to-day is but one in a week 
of days in which all the elements seem to merge 
and blend in equipoise ; when the earth floats on in 
a sea of peace ; when to open one's eyes is a delight, 
and just to breathe and to be seems the consumma- 
tion of existence. We wish Mars and Saturn would 
have a conjunction oftener, if their attraction for 
each other could reach in such delightful results this 
latitude. By this time Washingtonians are usu- 
ally dissolving in a state of bad temper and discom- 
fort, painful to behold and much more painful to 
feel. Now there is nothing in the heaven above, in 
the earth beneath, or in the air we breathe, but balm, 
beauty, harmony. Through an atmosphere which 
holds commingled the fragrance of the Tropics with 
the tonic of the oxygen of the North we gaze upon 
the blossoming earth. Magnolias do not bloom only 
for the gentle mistress of the White House, though 
its wide old rooms are sweet with their odors, which 
find their way to many another room through the 
kindness of her heart. But in the centre of Lafayette 
Square one stately tree holds up into the azure its 
sumptuous cups of cream}' white, till the whole bosky 
shade is penetrated with the fine fragrance they hold. 
It is poured equally upon the old black man, sitting 
under its branches, and on the fair white child play- 



LOVE OF NATURE. 173 

ing in the path. To-day the largess of beauty seems 
to rest on every created thing. Somewhat of the 
harmony of the spheres should penetrate human na- 
ture. We should be as amiable as the angels who 
bask on the banks of the River of Life, — we to 
whom the elixir of life flows in from every vein in 
Nature." 

One other quotation seems worthy of a place 
because it is so expressive, especially in the 
concluding sentences, of the reverent nature of 
the writer, and because it describes so well the 
beauty of Washington in the late autumn : — 

" Still the heavenly days linger. Still the banners 
of autumn in ever-lengthening lines of gold trail 
along the tree-tops that park the streets for miles and 
miles. Winter seems to hover afar off, as if loath to 
quench the glor3 r of the still-blooming earth. In the 
garden roses still unfold their fragrant hearts to the 
pale sunshine of the waning year. Far awaj" o'er 
' the happy autumn fields ' broods the nebulous 
gold of this entrancing atmosphere. It swathes all 
things — -the solvent river, the solid hills, the parks 
and homes of the city. The maples back of the 
President's house seem to mass against it in piles of 
gold, while the undulating lawns run in emerald to 
the river. When Congress adjourned, yesterday, 



174 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

and the rushing law-makers broke loose upon the 
street, intent upon their long-delayed dinner, the 
setting sun, vast and red, stood level upon the crest 
of the Virginia hills, and as he went glowed full up- 
on their faces. The whole city flushed in the glow. 
Spire and roof and tree-top took on the splendor of 
the ' one vast Iris of the West.' We stood on the 
western terrace of the Capitol — a woman true as 
truth and all alive to beauty, and I — and took in for 
mention' the magnificence of the moment. No city 
on earth could have shown a fairer sight, touched 
with more idyllic splendors, than did much-berated 
Washington at that moment. And, as twilight rose 
supreme above the hills, out of a vast interfusing sea 
of amber, I glanced at the faces of the men hurrying 
by, to see how many of them all would look up and 
on to the gloiy before their eyes. All, perhaps, 
were unconsciously conscious that the air, clear and 
fine, was soothing to their senses ; but how few of 
all those hundreds received with one thought the 
vast bounty of beaut}' spread out before them ! 
Were such a sight visible but once in a thousand 
years, all the tribes of earth would make painful pil- 
grimages to congregate and gaze. But Nature is so 
lavish we receive her constant largess even of sun- 
shine and air without consciousness — often without 
thanks. Words are all too poor to tell of the muni- 
ficence of this autumn — of the long procession of 
balsamic days that have distilled their healing odors 



LOVE OF NATURE. 175 

for us ; of the four marvellous planets that night 
after night light their worlds of splendor above our 
homes, and simply by their presence in the dim pro- 
found lift us for the moment from the struggles of 
the race to the thought of tiie loftier paths and lone- 
lier journeys of our sister planets. Jupiter and 
Venus do not blaze night after night in vain, even for 
the inhabitants of this kindred world. Nor did Mars 
and Saturn meet, salute, and part, on their vast 
journey, without being watched by hundreds of pa- 
tient eyes outside of the Observatory. I scarcely 
wonder at the influence astrologers claim the planets 
exercise over the destinies and minds of mortals. I, 
whose occupation so often is to chronicle the doings 
of men, here make nry little sign, ere I take up my 
task, to say that the glory of God, as it flows over 
me day by day from his visible worlds, is what 
makes the burden light and the task endurable." 



CHAPTER IX. 



Power to delineate Character. — Personal Descrip- 
tions op Public Men. 



r I ''HE sketches and portraits of distinguished 
persons in Washington, which formed so 
prominent a feature of Mary Clemmer's pub- 
lished letters, constituted to many of her read- 
ers their principal charm. It would be hardly 
proper to omit from this volume some refer- 
ences to this power of describing personal ap- 
pearance, and at the same time delineating 
traits of character, which she possessed to such 
a remarkable degree. It was her skill in pic- 
turing together faces and characters, the out- 
ward appearance and the inner life and thought 
of the conspicuous men of the day, that gave 
her writings a special value to many who came 
to depend upon them for their impressions of 



POWER TO DELINEATE CHARACTER. 177 

the directors of public affairs at the capital. 
There was a freedom and often a sense of hu- 
mor in her touch which showed that she never 
stood in too much awe of her subject to tell the 
truth about him. She liked to praise the per- 
sons she wrote about, but she liked better to 
give a true impression of them. Here are three 
little bits of portraiture taken at random from 
her letters, which illustrate her method and 
show how she could condense into a few sen- 
tences the salient facts concerning a notable 
man's looks : — 

' ' A little further on I met Zachariah Chandler, 
burly and tall, but not straight like Wood ; caned, 
but not gloved ; his head far in advance of his feet, 
which ' toe ' far apart and rush on with mighty 
strides. He is evidently fresh from his barber. 
The dark locks, which time has spared, are shining, 
smooth, and patted down, as young men wore them 
years ago, before they affected shaved crowns and 
standing collars. His unwrinkled face is full of 
smiles, and altogether he wears a holiday aspect. It 
is rather an unusual sight to see Zachariah Chandler 
promenading the Avenue at two o'clock of the day ; 
and, seeing him, one is quite ready to believe that 
12 



178 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

he feels, as he says, as if he were let loose from 
school. I believe I never said so before, biit am 
going to now, — that, on the whole, I like this man. 
Perhaps it is because I like his daughter a great 
deal better than I do him, and fancy that the father 
of so true a woman must have a certain quantity of 
good qualities of his own. I am sure he has." 



"An equally intellectual-looking man is John 
Sherman, Secretaty of the Treasury. He is at least 
six feet high and rather slender. He has a most 
thoughtful face, with calm, far-reaching eyes ; and 
in the absolute repose of his manner is the antipodes 
of his brother, the famous General of the army. 
Secretary Sherman has a high head, with large ears, 
long mouth, and a capacious nose, broad at the 
bridge. He has a full crop of hair and a full beard, 
rather closeby shorn. An atmosphere of great seren- 
ity surrounds him, and in the utmost heat and stress 
of debate he is always master of himself and of his 
argument. He has the true dignit}' of a senator, 
never exhibiting bad temper, though no one could 
accuse him 6f a lack of intense earnestness. He has 
the judicial brow and mind, a wise, strong man, with 
a tender heart, which he never hangs out for the 
world's inspection." 

"The appearance of John Logan on the Senate 
floor called forth some half-smothered but sponta- 



DESCRIPTIONS OF PUBLIC MEN. 179 

neons cheering from the galleries. The galleries 
seemed to be glad to see 'John' back again. Time 
also has touched this man gently. His raven locks 
show not a single silver thread, nor his brown face a 
single line either of though!; or care. Not that he is 
a thoughtless-looking person ; quite the contrary. 
But he is one whose inward scars, if he has any, do 
not show outside." 

Here is a picture of Speaker Randall as he 
appeared in 1878, which certainly does full jus- 
tice to a man of marked individuality : — 

" Mr. Randall's presence in the chair is extremely 
winning. Cast in Roman mould, tall and powerful, 
he sits high and looks the man he is. He is just 
fifty years old, but does not look forty-five. Those 
traces of wear and tear so palpable on the faces of 
many public men, telling sometimes of too little 
sleep, sometimes of too much drink, of eating ambi- 
tion, or of nameless dissipation, are in nowise visible 
here. The face tells somehow another sweeter and 
rarer stoiy, — of a happy home and of household 
loves. I doubt if any man could carry that expres- 
sion who has a home and is not happy in it. Mr. 
Randall has a fine head, covered with closely curling 
black hair, clearly cut, strong features, with a square, 
solid, but not heavy jaw ; a mouth that could hardly 



180 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

fail to have its own wa} r if it set about it. The 
very strong will of the man is perfectly apparent in 
his countenance, but, combined with the head and 
brow, gives the impression of large power rather 
than of mere wilfulness. It is said that Mr. Ran- 
dall's favorite pastime is the stud}' of astronomy ; 
that when he wants to forget the broils of House 
committees, he lifts his eyes to the heavenly bodies. 
This must explain the cherubic expression which 
steals over his uplifted countenance occasionally, 
even amid the turmoil of the House. The most 
practical of men, when nothing important is going 
on I have seen him look as if he were star-gazing. 
What a rest it must be to turn from the bedlam be- 
low to the imaginaiy contemplation of Saturn's rings 
and Jupiter's ridiculous little moons ! " 

Worthy of preservation here also is this little 
picture of a personality that was so long a nota- 
ble one in the House of Representatives. The 
paragraph was written in 1879. 

" Holding a levee in his little wagon in the space 
before the Speaker's desk sits Alexander Hamilton 
Stephens, that almost disembodied spirit, that will o'- 
the-wisp of a patriot, who still persists in staying in 
the most transparent shell of a body and in bringing 



DESCRIPTIONS OF PUBLIC MEN. 181 

it punctually to Congress. Every year the body 
looks a little smaller and the eyes considerably 
bigger. Marvellously big and bright they are, these 
eyes, set in such a pale, shadowy face. One does 
not have to look long to have it seem that the e3 T es 
are all there is of this man. His hands are attenuated, 
and as he slowly and feebly propels the wheels of his 
chair, one expects each moment to see it finally 
pause. But no ; still it pushes on, and we are told 
that the little gentleman is in better health than he 
has been for twenty years. His face is most pa- 
thetic, from the seal of life-long suffering it bears. 
The brightness and kindliness of the large, dark 
eyes, set in its whiteness, make it not only attrac- 
tive, but decidedly winning. Men of every tempera- 
ment and shade of opinion come up to him ; and at 
last, when the little wagon-chair moves slowby on to 
the outer door, while one hand moves it, the other is 
outstretched to take the many eager ones reached 
out to him, in most affectionate farewell." 

There was no glamour in the view that she 
was wont to present of the great military chief- 
tain who for eight years was the President of 
the Republic ; but she was glad to praise him 
when she could, and the following sketch of 
him as he appeared in January, 1877, near the 



182 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

close of his second term, cannot be regarded as 
lacking in kindness or in graphic touch : — 

"Another exceedingly well-dressed man who 
walks Pennsylvania Avenue is President Grant. I 
met him just above the Treasury, with his son ' Buck,' 
as tall as himself and the best looking of the young 
Grants, and made the mental comment, ; The Presi- 
dent looks like a gentleman.' He did not always 
look quite a gentleman. In the earlier days of his 
administration he did dump his hands in his pocket 
and travel slowly along the street with a smoking 
cigar in his mouth. He does no such thing now. 
The stories that you read of the President going 
along the street in this fashion at present are all fic- 
tions. Neither does he any longer use his pockets 
as mittens. His hands are carefully gloved and he 
carries a substantial cane. He is thoroughly well 
dressed, as if his habiliments were the outward ex- 
pression of an inward renovated self. I know old 
people who would sa}-, comparing him with his for- 
mer self, ' The President looks as if he had got 
religion.' It seems to me that the day has gone by 
when any one believes that slovenliness is a sign of 
intellect or genius. It is usually the sign that }'0U 
are dirty or lazy, and that there is something very 
wrong the matter with you. How man}- times a 
man puts on a better and a sweeter life with the new 



DESCRIPTIONS OF PUBLIC MEN. 183 

coat that he has worked and paid for. Emerson 
knew all about it when he said : ' If a man has not 
firm nerves and has keen sensibility, it is a wise 
economy to go to a good shop and dress himself irre- 
proachably.' So the President's good coat is a sym- 
bol and a sign. Just as the newspaper man (the 
woman did not say so) declared that the President 
was very red in the face, that he was about to have the 
apoplexy, that he smoked fifteen or twenty cigars a 
da} T , and was ' drinking himself to death,' the Presi- 
dent slowly emerged from the White House, in his 
right mind, wearing exceeding good clothes, no 
cigar in his mouth, a cane in his gloved hand, his 
head erect, his eyes alert, and walked down Penn- 
sylvania Avenue ; and thus, erect, cigarless, and 
well-dressed, he has continued almost daily to walk 
ever since. Whatever fault may be found with in- 
dividual acts of the President, no one who remembers 
him when he entered the Chief Executive office can 
fail to see in him now decided indications of mental 
growth. He is a larger man physically and a larger 
man intellectually than when he reached the supreme 
office. You see it in the prouder, firmer step ; in 
the quick, alert glance ; the clearer and stronger 
features, — as if the multifarious demands of the posi- 
tion had not only sharpened but increased his facul- 
ties, while the social side of it, at least, had softened 
and refined his sensibilities." 



184 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

Against this picture of Grant may be set 
another and more strongly drawn portrait, — 
that of General Garfield at the time of his 
election to the Presidency in 1880 : — 

" One sometimes meets a man or woman in whom 
there seems to be material enough, personal and 
mental, to make half a dozen of the average sort. 
This impression one gets from General Garfield. 
The first consciousness is of his immense vitality. 
Had he less brain, he might have made himself 
famous as a champion prize-fighter. He is said to 
be six feet high, but looks shorter, from the 
breadth and depth of his shoulders and chest. The 
large nutrition of the vital temperament supplies his 
very large brain, making a powerful enginery as the 
physical basis of manhood and statesmanship. His 
type is pure Saxon, in itself sufficient to account for 
the fictitious story of his German ancestry. His 
eyes are light blue, perceptive rather than deep, 
while harmony and strength combine in features and 
profile. He once called the attention of a friend to 
the fact that the most intellectual men in the depart- 
ments, as a class, were very deficient in ' back head,' 
a lack that will never be observed in himself. The 
depth of his head from the arch of the nose through, 
in its way, is quite tremendous ; but the length 



DESCRIPTIONS OF PUBLIC MEN. 185 

from the top of the ear through the perceptive facul- 
ties is the most powerful mental characteristic of his 
head. It has also great height from the ear to the 
moral organs. The reasoning faculties, not small, 
seem so only by comparison with the remarkable 
development of the rest of his head. Such a head, 
sustained and driven hx the motif forces of a power- 
ful vital temperament, make the man what he is, — 
a giant in certain directions. Intellectually he is 
strongest in his perceptive faculties. To see, to 
know, to understand, through an extended range of 
vision ; to retain wbat he knows, to use what he 
knows, in perfect rhythm and order — his knowledge 
available at the swiftest call and at eveiy opportu- 
nity ; combined with his extreme cultivation, his 
love of sacred and classic story, his instinctive ven- 
eration for the good and great, his penetrating per- 
ception of the finer shades of character and feeling, 
his subtle tact in dealing with persons, his suave 
voice and affectionate manner — all make him per- 
sonally a favorite in social life and with his political 
comrades." 

She always delighted to speak words of praise 
of the English minister Sir Edward Thornton, 
who so long resided in Washington, and of his 
family. She wrote of them on one occasion as 

follows : — 



186 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

" America is in debt to England for the very high 
type of manhood it presents it in its personal repre- 
sentatives. The memories of Lord Napier, of Lord 
L}on, of Sir Frederic Bruce in Washington have not 
yet faded into traditions. Their portraits remain 
conspicuous in Brady's galley, and their personal 
gifts and graces linger with a freshness that amounts 
to tenderness in the minds of many people ; while 
the present British minister is honored and beloved 
by all classes. The wise and fine example of Sir 
Edward and Lady Thornton will live when the 
people the}* have helped to benefit can behold their 
faces no more. If you ask me in what this good 
example consists, I answer : In the very positive 
amount of good sense, good health, good breeding, 
simplicity, and unostentatious refinement which the}' 
quietly filter through each stratum of society. Vul- 
garity and pretence instinctively shrink and shrivel 
awa}' in the serene yet searching light of true gentle- 
manhood, of true ladyhood. In a crowded street- 
car Sir Edward Thornton does not disdain to give 
up his seat to a woman laden with a heavy market- 
basket ; nor to a colored woman on her way home 
after a da}' of toil in somebod3''s kitchen. His 
young daughters, in stout shoes and short dresses, 
tramped across the moors, ' over the hills and far 
away,' years before Queen Victoria's daughter crossed 
the ocean, to set the example of sturdy pedestrian- 
ism to the delicate and claint} T daughters of this 



DESCRIPTIONS OF PUBLIC MEN. 187 

Western land. Lady Thornton, always dignified, 
as a matron should be, never indulges in ' airs' or 
assumptions of any sort. Her perfect breeding never 
bears the flaw that shows she condescends." 

The old painter who spent so many years 
of his life in the Capitol at Washington, and 
who died in 1880, leaving his work there unfin- 
ished, was thus described in an " Independent " 
letter : — 

"For nearly two years the absorbing centre 
of interest to visitors in the Rotunda has been 
the human figure, dim in high air, at work on a 
little scaffold, clinging to the upper wall. The 
descent of Brumidi in the wooden basket, at three 
o'clock each afternoon, was the event of the day. 
He was an old man, wearing a thick mane of gray 
hair and a patriarchal beard. The width of his head 
seemed to lessen its height ; yet it was high, and his 
perceptive faculties the largest. His full, great 
eyes were set very wide apart, each side of a cogita- 
tive nose. His mouth, revealed by an open mous- 
tache, was firm and refined. He wore a military 
cloak, and to strangers bore the air of reticence, 
which well befits the aristocracy of genius. But his 
also was that impulse of quick response which 
belongs equalby to genius when it meets its own. 



188 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

He was cordial, charming, enthusiastic to all with 
whom he was in sympathy. He was cultivated in 
literature, could talk of Shakespeare, Dante, the old 
Italian and classic poets, and of historical art, by 
the hour. He had enthusiasm for man}' Americans. 
From a hundred places within the Capitol the faces 
of American statesmen look down upon posterity, 
painted by Brumidi. He had finished a portrait of 
Jefferson and was painting the portrait of Henry 
Clay at the time of his death." 

There is in one of her letters written in the 
autumn of 1877 a tribute to one of the greatest 
statesmen of the war period, — perhaps the 
most powerful intellect in either branch of Con- 
gress while he was in the Senate, — which may 
well be added to the collection of portraits in 
this chapter : — 

" Within the muffled Senate Chamber Morton's 
empty seat, its iron rest, its sable drapings, speak 
eloquently for him. That it should remain unoccu- 
pied, even for a week, seems an unusual mark of 
respect, as one recalls how soon even Sumner's seat 
was taken. I doubt if any senator who has passed 
away will be missed longer than Morton. This is 
true not more from his large pervasive quality of 



DESCRIPTIONS OF PUBLIC MEN 189 

presence than for his absolute devotion to his part}', 
and the solid, solemn force with which he expressed 
that devotion. I may say that day b}* da}- he 
pounded it into the ears of his listeners and the 
understandings of his comrades. He used no catch- 
words that delight the fancy, no clap-trap of speech ; 
but he had a positive skill of statement. Every 
sentence hit the mark, and the mark was always an 
indisputable fact. Invincibly persuaded of what he 
believed, every pulse of his heart, eveiy force of his 
mind was dedicated to it, till he seemed to stand 
forth himself the embodied fact. Words are too 
weak to measure his loss to his party. The waves 
will soon seem to close over the spot where he went 
down. The swift vast current of affairs will seem to 
rush on as if there had been no break. But it will 
not be so. The missing link will not be replaced. 
The dissolving elements in the great party in which 
he was so long a centripetal force must miss more 
and more his cohesive will as the}- fly farther and 
farther apart into the chaos of final dissolution. 
With Morton went the President's most powerful 
ally in the Republican party. To no one did it 
come harder than to the great war governor of In- 
diana to yield the final fruit of that war in the 
President's Southern policy ; but, having submitted 
to the inevitable result, in none other could the 
President have found so powerful a defender. The 
record of his past, unmarked by a single party 



190 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

deflection ; his unflinching devotion to that party, at 
any personal cost, against any odds, no matter how 
stupendous, would have made him a support to the 
present administration such as it will now seek in 
vain through the length and breadth of the Repub- 
lican ranks. 

" Some men's personality seems trivial beside their 
fame. If this were not true, Emerson would scarcely 
have written, ' Most people descend to meet.' The 
actual presence of those deemed ' the great ' is 
usually disappointing. This could not be said of 
Morton. Maimed and crippled though he was, he 
personally seemed to fill a larger space in the Senate 
than any other man in it except Sumner. After 
Sumner's death, in this pervasive quality of presence 
he had no peer. For while Roscoe Conkling has 
superb stature and marked appearance, he has van- 
ities of dress and manner to which Morton was a 
stranger. Even when he dragged himself upon two 
canes, Morton had the form of a giant, the neck, 
head, and face of a mastiff. Mighty, yet rude force, 
rather than refined strength, was expressed in all his 
lineaments. His e3'es, hair, and beard were black, 
his skin swarthy, his head large, round, and power- 
ful, and, with all his suffering and all his toil, when 
he left Washington last spring he looked like a man 
who had scarcely reached middle life. Victims of 
hopeless disease sometimes seem just before death to 
gather back into their faces somewhat of the old 



DESCRIPTIONS OF PUBLIC MEN. 191 

expression of youth, hope, and health. So it was 
with Morton. After entering the Senate, he never 
looked so young as he did last winter. Cutting off 
his beard, leaving his chin bare, relieved by a line 
of black moustaches, increased this aspect, and even 
gave him a look of distinction that he had not before. 
For years carried to his seat in a chair, he now 
walked in, leaning on two canes. Instead of sitting 
to speak, as he used, he now stood up, leaning on 
an iron rest ; and thus through the entire winter 
the great master of facts and ideas delivered his 
forceful arguments. All the journals commented on 
his visibly improved condition ; and many believed 
that length of da}^, as well as of honors, were yet in 
store for him. But in the terrible strain of the elec- 
toral struggle he visibly drooped. No human being 
could have felt this strain more than he. No one 
could have held its great issues closer to his heart. 
No one else gave to it so many hours of labor, at 
such cost of suffering and life. The hopeless weari- 
ness to which only the sleep of the beloved can bring 
long relief came into his e}'es. He saw what seemed 
the victory of his party, then what seemed its de- 
feat. Both were soon to be alike to him. That was 
the final strain that broke the silver cord. After 
the long, dauntless fight, it left him helpless beneath 
the fatal stroke to which his giant strength and 
weary soul at last succumbed." 



192 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

The impeachment trial of Secretary Belknap 
in the Senate Chamber in 1876 was an occasion 
of .great public interest, which brought to that 
Chamber a number of lawyers of much distinc- 
tion, some of whom are photographed in the fol- 
lowing extracts from one of her letters of that 
year : — 

" At the table opposite, the men are not cast in 
the ordinary moulds. Each man looks utterly unlike 
his fellow and only like himself. There at the fur- 
ther end is Jere Black, the great Pennsylvania 
lawyer. He has a certain benign expression that 
reminds 3011 of Sumner ; yet in this all likeness 
begins and ends. He is a venerable man, — I should 
say of more than seventy years ; august in size, 
with a positive human kindliness outraying from him 
like an atmosphere. His e3 T ebrows are very white 
and very shaggy. Beneath them a pair of keen, 
twinkling, humorous eyes lie in ambuscade. He is 
an old man, but Avhat he does not see would not be 
worth seeing. A sense of alertness, of vigilance, of 
quick, large consciousness is the most marked char- 
acteristic of his presence. His wig is far too young 
for his eyebrows. When a man as wise as Jere 
Black wears a red-brown wig above snow-white ej'e- 
brows, we conclude he abides in that supernal sphere 



DESCRIPTIONS OF PUBLIC MEN 193 

of mental action where the thought of anything so 
trivial as a wig never enters in ; or that his wife, by 
some means, has failed to do her duty in buying one 
of proper hue and placing it with her lovely hands 
upon his head. Poor martyr! If he could but lift 
it ever so little, and let a whiff of air in upon his 
scorching scalp, what an infinite solace it would be. 
But no. He can have no consolation but his ban- 
danna, his palm-leaf fan, and his silver snuff-box — 
neither one of which seems to be ever out of his 
hands. His manner is resignation itself. It says : 
' I am very hot. I am bored to the verge of des- 
peration. But I am a great lawyer and must bear 
the ills of life with equanimity. I have a client 
whom I do not respect, colleagues who seldom give 
me a chance to get a word in edgeways ; but I am a 
famous lawyer, nevertheless. The galleries all see 
me, therefore I cannot dispense with my coat nor 
take off my wig ; but I can endure my sufferings as 
a great lawyer should.' Montgomery Blair, who 
sits next to Judge Black, has not flesh enough on 
his bones to make him uncomfortable. He is very 
tall, as all the Blairs are, taking the stature of their 
august mother ; but he is not of grand proportions, 
as was his brother Frank. He is rather attenuated, 
with a clean-shaven face, sandy-red hair, very slightly 
bald, a mildly freckled complexion, and a rather in- 
definite cast of countenance. But there never was a 
Blair who was indefinite ; and Montgomery is fully 
13 



194 .4A T AMERICAN WOMAN. 

endowed with the high faculties of his race. I leave 
their politics out (though in these they have ever 
been true to all the traditions of their past) when I 
say that as a family they are most delightful. ' We 
were a loving set,' said the ancient yet beautiful 
mother of this elderly man, a year ago, to me, as 
she recalled her sisters and the da}^ of her earlv 
youth in Kentucky. And they are still ' a loving 
set.' This venerable pair, who have lived together 
nearly sevent}' years, treat each other with the chiv- 
ahy of youthful lovers : while their children, who 
themselves have passed the prime of life, pa}' them 
perpetual homage. Remembering Montgomery Blair 
in his home, it is not easy to criticise him in any 
public place. The last on the row of chairs sits the 
leader of Belknap's counsel, the famous Matt Car- 
penter. He beats the hot air with his fan, and 
shakes his silvery mane with vast impatience ; 3-et 
the planet spins on, and the prosecution nags him, 
and he cannot help himself. Studying him closery, 
he looks as if his whole life had been an orgy, so 
deeply is the expression of self-indulgence embedded 
in every feature. His hair has grown silvery white 
within two or three 3'ears, which softens his face all 
it can be softened. It is not an old face, nor a 
harsh one, and many call it handsome. He has the 
full, wide mouth and the large eyes of the orator, 
and in bearing he has the abandon of a brigand. 
He is dressed with more care than any other member 



DESCRIPTIONS OF PUBLIC MEN. 195 

of the counsel, in faultless, subduing black, with 
white waistcoat and tie. But who may measure his 
sufferings in such clothes in such weather? 'Bower ! 
Leave off the s, I say ! ' he exclaimed, fiercely, to the 
reading-clerk, yesterday, who committed the faux 
pas of saying ' Bowers ' ; and with this exclama- 
tion his broadcloth sleeve was stripped up above his 
elbow, as if it had been sent up by a streak of light- 
ning. His voice is silvery in its softness, and of the 
sweetest quality. No human being was ever dow- 
ered with such a voice who had not received from 
Nature many of the tenderest and most lovable 
qualities of humanity." 

These are a few specimens of the vivid and 
yet sympathetic tone of her references to notable 
people whom newspaper editors wished to in- 
form their readers about. They might be mul- 
tiplied to fill a volume. Only one more shall be 
added, — a brief selection from a letter of 1879, 
giving a glimpse of Lincoln and Stanton : — 

" As day b} r da} - the bricks sift out of the walls of 
the old War Department, and its dismantled rooms 
become visible from the crowded street, we realize 
more and more what a landmark of memory is being 
swept forever out of sight. The immense State, 



196 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

Navy, and War Departments, covering an entire 
block, will, when completed, be imposing from the 
veiy space it occupies, exasperating as it is in de- 
tail, with its innumerable small windows, which, like 
small eyes in a human face, must remain a perpetual 
offence. But, whatever its defects or splendors, it 
belongs to a new world. As I see the relic of the 
old life day b} r day fade out, I see again marching 
by its side, his guard behind — as I saw him one 
Sabbath morning — Stanton, with his implacable, 
melancholy face; and Lincoln, as I saw him one 
evening under the stars, — under the umbrage of the 
immemorial elms that line the boulevard leading 
from the White House to the War Department. 
Every evening Lincoln took that walk alone, going 
over to the War Department to ease his own anxiet} 7 
concerning the progress of affairs in those fateful 
days of war. Both are pictures of the past, — these 
two men as they come back to me, vividly as when 
I saw them a part of life and of the continuity of 
things. I doubt if I can ever look upon the new 
War Department without beholding them." 



CHAPTER X. 

Concerning her Poetry. — How It was regarded by 
Herself and by Others. 

PO much has been said in previous chapters 
of Mary Clemmer's poetry, that it may 
not be thought necessary to make that part 
of her literary work the topic of a separate 
chapter of this volume. There are, however, 
some considerations which in justice to her 
should not be left out of view in estimat- 
ing the quality and merit of her poetical 
work. Although much of her poetry seemed 
to be a rhythmical record of emotional states, 
and although it was evolved at times, as 
has been remarked, with great rapidity and al- 
most without apparent conscious effort, yet it 
must be said that she was in no wise lack- 
ing in a due appreciation of the methods and 



198 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

conditions of meritorious and successful com- 
position. She realized keenly what severe and 
arduous toil even the most skilful and ac- 
complished worshipper of the Muse may find 
necessary in the performance of his task. 
When her volume of poems was about to be 
published, feeling that she ought to include 
in it some stronger and better work than she 
had already done, she wrote a number of son- 
nets, attempting therein to demonstrate her 
power to utilize the most arbitrary and con- 
fining of poetical forms. But she was always 
careful not to overestimate her own gifts ; 
and, indeed, in speaking of her poetry she 
often underestimated them. She wrote to a 
friend in 1883: — 

" I am more than glad that your heart could re- 
spond to any line of mine. Perhaps I have already 
said to you that I feel toward my verses as a mother 
must feel toward some child of hers not lovely nor of 
specially good report among men. She knows what 
it might have been under kindlier conditions ; there- 
fore its veiy unshapeliness may make it dearer to 



CONCERNING HER POETRY. 199 

her, and there is a pathos in the very tenderness she 
feels for this outcome from her heart of hearts." 

To another friend she wrote as follows: — 

" May I ask you to accept a copy of my ' Poems 
of Life and Nature,' issued by Osgood last winter 
and passed already to a second edition? They ask 
indulgence, if only for the wide range of time they 
cover. Many of them were written in extreme youth, 
others as late as last winter one year ago, I claim 
nothing for them but spontaneity and sincerity. They 
are true to truth as I knew it." 

The references to her poetry in the follow- 
ing letter from Franconia in September, 1882, 
shed light on her own estimate of what she had 
done and felt she could do as a poet: — 

" This perfect day fills me with unavailing wishes 
for jour presence. It would be such a day in Lover's 
Lane in the woods above the house. It is just 
crispy cool enough to walk in, to talk in, or to sit 
down in. Yesterday afternoon I took a book and 
pencil, sauntered up the hill, and sat down in the 
wood. It was the first afternoon since I came here 
that I could avail myself of this charming privilege. 
But with nry completed manuscripts on my table, I 
sallied forth with a lightened heart and happy mind, 



200 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

and sitting down, I added at once some seven or 
eight verses to a poem I began last autumn in 
Boston, 4 Happy Days,' ■which I shall send you after 
the rest to complete the section in the book called 
' Nature.' I am glad you feel an interest in this 
book which is so deeply a part of me. Every line 
in it, almost, recalls some shade of emotion or ex- 
perience which made intrinsically a part of my life. 
Life has given me no leisure, in the stress of work 
and responsibility which it has laid upon me to cul- 
tivate Poetiy as an art. But if I live, this book is 
but a prelude to another of a much higher order to 
come after it. To this, one j'ear in Europe will be 
of inexpressible value. I need it beyond expression 
for new pictures and added cultivation. Within 
the last three months, with returning health, I have 
been conscious of a vast increase of mental force 
and power of expression. I want nothing now but 
new experience to reach a mark I never reached 
before." 

Her public and private letters contain many 
passages which show how high were her poetic 
ideals. To " reach a mark I never reached 
before " was her one constant aim. She was 
keenty sensitive to the intrinsic worth and qual- 
ity of the work of other poets. She sometimes 



CONCERNING HER POETRY. 201 

felt like uttering a lament over the lack of a 
nobler and truer tone in much of the poetry 
of the period. Writing in April, 1882, of the 
death of Longfellow, and of the tendency of so 
many of the younger American poets of both 
sexes toward merely mechanical and unsympa- 
thetic poetical methods, she said : — 

" Nor is this scarcely less true of the men whose 
names are constantly given in reviews as the suc- 
cessors of our elder poets. Literature has become 
to them more or less a trade, and the mark of the 
market is visibly set upon nearly all that they do. 
Men who in rare moments of inspiration gave the 
world in the past occasional poems whose fineness of 
thought and fitness of form seemed to hold the qual- 
ity of immortality, are now consumed by editing, hy 
novel-writing, by the drudgerj' of the literary or the 
pecuniary hack. There is only so much of the very 
strongest or finest of us all, and the life-force or the 
thought-force consumed in the tug of earning one's 
daily bread often leaves little or nothing for the as- 
piration, stifled at its first breath, or for the inspira- 
tion whose finest springs were drained at their very 
source. If the true end of poetry is to awaken men 
to the divine side of things, to bear witness to the 
beauty that clothes the outer world, the nobility that 



202 AN AMEBIC AN WOMAN. 

lies often obscured in human souls, to call forth sym- 
pathy for neglected truths, for noble but oppressed 
persons, for downtrodden causes, and to make men 
feel that through all outward beauty and all pure 
inward affection God Himself is addressing them, 
where in this uttermost consecration which baptized 
Milton, touched Wordsworth, which veins Emerson, 
Longfellow, and Whittier, and at rarer intervals 
Lowell and Holmes, — where in the succeeding gener- 
ation is our gre*at poet? And yet there is not a man 
or woman in the land who can la} r claim to be in any 
acknowledged sense a poet, who has not in some rare 
hour of exaltation produced a poem which holds in 
itself and in the recognition of the people the highest 
and finest qualities of poetry. One such poem proves 
the normal capacity of the nature which produces it. 
That so little of such rare fruit appears in the great 
yearly harvest of rhyme is the fault chiefly of the 
soil and atmosphere which nourish it. Figs do not 
grow on thistles ; nor is exalting poetry ever begotten 
of vanity, or vainglory, or of money-need or greed, 
or of a deliberate purpose on the part of any one 
to be a very fine poet. Thus the integral lack of 
American poetry is not a lack in mere color or form, 
certainly not a lack of self-consciousness nor of self- 
assertion. It is the lack of the highest spirit which 
can inspire and exalt poetry, 

" The central peace subsisting at the heart 
Of endless agitation ; " 



CONCERNING HER POETRY. 203 

the consecration of the whole creative mind to the 
Best in the human and the divine life. Our poetry 
has art, but it has not devotion. It may be •' aesthetic,' 
but it is not spiritual. It may be ' finished,' but it 
is not spontaneous. In fine and poor degree it does 
not lack fit poetic form ; it lacks the profound emo- 
tion, the spiritual belief and impulse, the moral force 
and exaltation behind it, without which the greatest 
poetry is not possible." 

While their tone, and often the whole thought 
interwoven into her verses, was a reflection of 
her own emotions and experiences, yet many of 
her poems possessed no such significance, and 
some which were supposed most strikingly to 
depict incidents or facts in her own life were 
of a wholly different character. Mary Clemmer 
was never a mother, and it was long a source 
of intense amusement to her that certain rural 
correspondents who had read the verses called 
" When Baby Comes," declined to accept this 
fact as the truth, and insisted that she must 
have had a child of her own, even although she 
might have, as one wrote, " hid it away some- 



9 



204 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

where." Other poems which were of a purely- 
sympathetic character were similarly misinter- 
preted ; and it was on this topic that the friendly 
hand, to whom acknowledgment has previously 
been made, wrote in the Boston " Traveller : " 

" The poet has as his material two kinds of expe- 
rience, — one which he has lived in outward detail, 
and the other, quite as real, which he has lived intui- 
tively, or through sympathy with others. It is the 
latter which is far more apt to serve as the atmosphere 
for the gloiy and the freshness of his dream, the ma- 
terials from which he draws his visions. Yet what- 
ever he writes straightway the critics assert is ' written 
from his own experience.' A curious little instance 
of this kind is noted in the various interpretations 
of a certain volume of poems just given to the world. 
In them is one entitled ' One Death,' in which ' the 
dead love ' is alluded to ; on which a discriminating 
critic rises to explain that ' the author wrote this 
poem out of an anguish worse than death.' "Which 
tragical statement the author read with mingled in- 
dignation and amusement. The real truth was, it 
was written when she — for the author is a lady in 
this case — was a young girl, and written from sym- 
pathy with another young lady friend who was alien- 
ated from her lover ; and when writing the poem she 



CONCERNING HER POETRY. 205 

was personally unacquainted with 'dead' love, or 
living love, or any other kind. The modern critic 
reminds one of Cuvier, who from a bit of bone or 
hair could predicate the entire animal ; likewise the 
critic, from a fragment of an allusion, can construct 
a life of romance or tragedy, and put it on exhibition 
before the public." 

Among the multitude of notices of her volume 
of poems there were many that were calculated 
to encourage and stimulate her ; only now and 
then a flippant or careless word was written by 
some unsympathetic critic. Perhaps there is no 
newspaper in the United States that maintains 
a higher standard of literary criticism than the 
New York "Sun;" and what has been written 
here of Mary Clemmer's poetry may be pleas- 
antly and properly supplemented by what was 
written by the accomplished critic of the 
"Sun:" — 

" In ' Poems of Life and Nature,' by Mary Clem- 
mer, we have a record of so much of the thought 
and feeling of a woman's life as spontaneously or 
easily found utterance in verse. The author of this 
volume has thought deeply and felt keenly, and the 



206 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

result is, that her verse is soulful as well as tuneful, 
is fraught with a more powerful and lasting attraction 
than the pretty melodies with which some singers of 
her sex prove to us how cleverly they grasp the trick 
of metrical expression. There is here no noticeable 
lack of technical skill in the management of rhythm 
and rhyme, — though it might be possible to point out 
some unimportant shortcomings, — but it is the idea 
or the sentiment of the verse to which our attention 
is specially invited ; that is to say, the writer seems 
to have drawn her inspiration and her conception 
of a poet's office from Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 
Tennyson ; and she is so free from an} - trace of famil- 
iarity with the school which makes mere melody and 
sensuous emotion the sole aims of the poet's art, that 
one might almost venture to aver she has never read 
a line of Swinburne, Morris, or Rossetti. Yet some 
of her lines have a haunting music of their own, 
though here, as elsewhere, it is plain that the author 
is possessed with the thought or the feeling to be 
conveyed, rather than with much anxiety about the 
vehicle of transmission. Take as an illustration of 
the pleasing and sufficiently melodious form in which 
her reveries sometimes clothe themselves, some stan- 
zas from a poem entitled ' The Days ' : — 

' The days, the days, the swift, mute days 
That fly across our fitful ways, 
That bear us through the tangled maze 
We call our life — the days ! the days 1 



CONCERNING HER POETRY. 207 



• I sigh not for the heavenly ways 
That wait above our checkered days ; 
I love these days that fly so fast, 
These mortal days that cannot last. 

* 'T is made of days, our meagre span, 
In links that bind for bliss or ban ; 
They fold us in their shadows dun, 
They bear the splendors of the sun. 



' Heart, gather in thine aftermath ; 
What far, faint fragrances it hath ! 
What calm broods down the storm-swept way ! 
What beauty veins the fair, meek day ! 

' What music murmurs fine and clear, 
What peace pervades its atmosphere ; 
What love, what dear companionships, 
Pour from the eyes, the voice, the lips ! 

' What courage, what high patience sweet, 
What rest, what tenderness complete, 
What trust in God, what faith in man, 
In woman, meet in one day's span ! 

' Thou day of days ! Thy pulses run 
Into my life, and we are one ; 
Far on in deep content I '11 say, 
" My life began that day, that day." ' 

" Among the sonnets, of which there are a score in 
this collection, two seem to us worthy of particular 
commendation, both as regards the substantial worth 
of the thought developed, and the skill of the evolu- 



208 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

tion in conformity with the laws of a difficult species 
of composition. One of them is called ' Inadequacy,' 
and the other, ' The Joy of Work. 

' I saw a fallen swallow on the street 

Beat on the cruel stone its wounded wing, 
And lift its voiceful throat as if to sing. 

It sought to soar, as if on pinion fleet ; 

It stirred with inchoate song, so sweet, so sweet, 
That died unsung. The poor, low murmuring, 
Wrung of its pain, how pitiful a thing, 

While mocked the Heaven it could not rise to meet! 

Ah 1 thus we greet the challenge of the sky ; 
The far fulfilment we can never gain, 
For wounding circumstance and wilting pain 

Hold hack the soaring soul that fain would fly. 
We seek to sing the high immortal strain ; 

But close to earth flutters our futile cry.' 



' The promise of delicious youth may fail ; 

The fair fulfilment of our summer time 

May wane and wither at its hour of prime ; 
The gorgeous glow of Hope may swiftly pale ; 
E'en Love may leave us spite our piteous wail ; 

The heart, defeated, desolate, may climb 

To lonely Reason on her height sublime ; 
But one sure fort no foe can e'er assail. 
' T is thine, O Work — the joy supreme of thought, 

Where feeling, purpose, and long patience meet ; 
Where in deep silence the ideal wrought 

Bourgeons from blossoming to fruit complete. 
crowning bliss 1 O treasure never bought 1 

All else may perish, thou remainest sweet.' 



CONCERNING HER POETRY. 209 

"It seems to us that the author is at her best in 
a poem entitled, 'The Journalist' She appreciates 
with rare insight the burdens and sacrifices, the sat- 
isfactions and compensations of an exacting voca- 
tion, and her conception is expressed with unusual 
vigor and felicity'. Our readers will be glad to see 
some extracts from the lines, which almost for the 
first time render adequate justice and due honor to 
the nameless hirelings of the press. 

" Man of the eager eyes and teeming brain, 
Small is the honor that men dole to thee ; 
They snatch the fruitage of thy years of pain — 
Devour, yet scorn the tree. 

" What though the treasure of thy nervous force, 
Thy rich vitality of mind and heart, 
Goes swiftly down before thy Moloch's course — 
Men cry, ' It is not art ! ' 



" ' Only a newspaper ! ' Quick read, quick lost, 
"Who sums the treasure that it carries hence 1 
Torn, trampled under feet, who counts thy cost, 
Star-eyed Intelligence 1 

" And ye, the nameless, best-beloved host ! 

My heart recalls more than one vanished face, 
Struck from the rank of toilers — early lost, 
And leaving not a trace. 

"Martyrs of news, young martyrs of the press — 
Princes of giving from largess of brain ! 
One leaf of laurel, steeped in tenderness, 
Take ye, early slain. 
14 



210 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

" Though in the Pantheon no niche obscure 
Your waning names can hold forever fast, 
The seeds of Truth ye blew afar are sure 
To spring and live at last. 

"On lonely wastes, within the swarming marts, 
In silent dream, in speaking deeds of men — 
Quick with momentum from your deathless hearts, 
Your thoughts will live again. 

" To serve thy generation, this thy fate : 

* Written in water/ swiftly fades thy name : 
But he who loves his kind does, first and late, 
A work too great for fame." 



CHAPTER XI. 

The Visit in Europe. — Her Last Illness. — Death. 

/^VN the 19th of June, 1883, in St. John's 
Church in Washington, Mary Clemraer 
and the writer of these words were married; 
and thus it became possible for one who had 
tried to sustain her courage and her faith in the 
possibility of realizing in her own life larger 
blessings and rewards than had come to her, 
to minister for a little time more efficiently to 
the gentle and beautiful spirit, so soon to be 
withdrawn from the world. A visit to Europe 
immediately followed the marriage, beginning 
with a voyage on the " Scythia," which sailed 
from New York on the 20th of June, and 
ending with the return on the "Pavonia," 
which arrived at New York on the 16th day of 



212 AN AMERICAN WOMAN 

October. The journeying in England, Scotland, 
and on the Continent proved a perpetual delight, 
but her strength was utterly inadequate to the 
requirements of her eager and interested mind. 
The result was, that in spite of every caution 
the physical exhaustion from which she suffered 
greatly previous to her departure from America 
constantly increased. She did not fail to enjo} r 
any historic place that she visited ; but, feeling 
such weakness, the necessity for " moving on " 
was a grievous thing to her. After making the 
northern tour, she was able to settle down for 
a month in London, but not, of course, to rest. 
There were friends who must be seen and 
there were the places of universal interest 
that must be visited. She found herself barely 
able to stand as she made her way through the 
haunts of the literary celebrities in Fleet Street, 
or gazed upon the beautiful pictures that adorn 
the palace at Hampton Court. While in Lon- 
don she was especially indebted to Mr. Lowell, 
to Mr. Justin McCarthy, to Mrs. John Cashel 



THE VISIT IN EUROPE. 213 

Hoey, and to Mrs. Conway for kind attentions ; 
and her stay was rendered as agreeable as it 
possibly could be to one in her enfeebled 
condition. 

From London the journey lay by way of 
Brussels and the Rhine to the German watering- 
places and to Switzerland. There was a brief 
detour from Cologne to Crefeld, where American 
interests are so well guarded and American citi- 
zens so hospitably entertained by our able con- 
sular representative, Mr. Potter. After a short 
stay at Wiesbaden and Homburg, came the 
great wonder and delight of Heidelberg. Here 
there occurred an incident the full significance 
of which could not at the time be understood. 
Arriving late in the afternoon, it was dark when 
quarters had been procured at the Castle hotel, 
and when dinner was over the matchless ruin 
rose before us magical and mysterious in the 
soft August moonlight. Surely imagination can 
create no picture more marvellous than Heidel- 
berg Castle, approached and beheld for the first 



214 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

time on a moonlit night in summer. To climb 
and feel one's way along the deeply shad- 
owed paths that lead across the embankments 
to the outer walls and towers of the castle is 
a task of no small difficult}'. Suddenly the 
shattered towers and lofty walls loom directly 
before you in the undimmed radiance of the 
full moon. It is an experience into which a 
sense of the supernatural easily finds its way. 
In the absolute silence and loneliness of that 
beautiful August night there suddenly fell on 
the two who stood there beneath the walls of 
Heidelberg a consciousness of the nearness of 
death. It was the 20th of August, and just 
one year afterward the form of Mary Clemmer 
was laid in its last resting-place in the church- 
yard at Rock Creek. 

A week of beautiful sunshine at Baden-Baden 
served to dissipate a little the solemn prevision 
that came to Mary Clemmer at Heidelberg. 
Then followed a delightful experience in Swit- 
zerland, and an excursion from Lucerne to 



THE VISIT IN EUROPE. 215 

Como that was a perfect joy. A Sabbath in 
September on Lake Como ! The world can 
furnish nothing more entrancing. The dense 
clouds hung low on all the mountain-tops, form- 
ing a vast sounding-board underneath which 
the soft clangor of the bells in the myriad of 
campaniles resounded like the notes of a great 
cathedral organ. All the morning we listened to 
this music, and gazed on the beautiful scenery 
of those wonderful shores. Then we sat for an 
hour on the piazzas of Bellagio, and ate the fresh 
figs that almost fell in our laps as we waited 
for the little boat that was to take us to Lecco, 
whence the railroad leads to Milan. In the 
evening we walked in the great cathedral, and 
that day was commemorated by Mary Clemmer 
in the sonnet that follows : — 

A CATHEDRAL WINDOW. 

A window high in an emblazoned wall 

Gleams like a jewel 'neath a sculptured fane 
Upon the image of our Saviour slain ; 
While close the crowding people humbly fall, 
And gazing on him, on his dear name call, 



216 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

A woman, scarred with grief, with eyes astrain. 

Looks to her lifted Lord. The glowing pane 
Pours glory on her in a golden thrall. 
Now while I wander o'er the earth's green space, 

Those weary eyes imploring plain I see ; 
Unto the lovely Saviour's sacred face 

The woman's face of pain turns piteously ; 
But lo ! on both the glorious window's grace 

Opes wide the Heaven waiting her and me. 

Milan, Italy, September, 1883. 

Another week was spent at Interlaken, va- 
ried by excursions to the bases of the nearer 
glaciers, and to St. Beatenberg, where Lady 
Thornton and her accomplished daughters were 
recuperating from the effects of the trying cli- 
mate of St. Petersburg. Fortunate is the trav- 
eller who makes his home in the charming hotel 
above the town which bears the name of Jung- 
fraublick. In her last days, when she could 
only lisp the thoughts that came to her, and 
memory seemed to fail, she still whispered, 
" Jungfraublick," when asked what place in 
all her European experience had been most de- 
lightful to her. On the way from Interlaken 



THE VISIT IN EUROPE. 217 

to Geneva occurred one of the most delightful 
incidents of her European tour. She was en- 
abled to spend a quiet afternoon at Coppet, on 
the banks of Lake Leman, the chateau of Ma- 
dame de Stael, whose life and character had 
always been to her a fascinating study. She 
' wrote an account of this visit on her return, 
which is preserved in the new edition of " Out- 
lines." Almost equally interesting was the 
afternoon spent at Voltaire's old home, Ferney, 
which is so pleasantly reached by carriage from 
Geneva. After an agreeable stay in Geneva, 
and a fortnight in Paris, came the farewell to 
London and the week in the Isle of Man already 
alluded to. The restful and placid voyage from 
Liverpool to New York seemed to restore her 
energies a little ; and on her arrival at her home 
she was so far from being an invalid in appear- 
ance, that every one congratulated her on her 
apparently improved health. In this illusion she 
herself was a sharer ; but a few weeks served 
wholly to change her looks and her feelings. 



218 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

At the beginning of December came a period 
of severe prostration, and this was speedily 
followed by the commencement of the paralysis 
of limbs and brain that increased until the end, 
eight months afterward. 

The illness in December caused a postpone- 
ment of a pleasure which she had promised her- 
self immediately after her return from Europe, 
— a visit to Boston, where for a number of years 
she had enjoyed some most agreeable friend- 
ships. As soon as she mended a little she in- 
sisted on making the effort, although she was in 
reality quite unfit for the journey. Perhaps a 
consciousness that she would look upon the faces 
of her friends there for the last time impelled 
her to go. Probably the results were not harm- 
ful to her, and the weeks she spent at her favor- 
ite resting-place, the Hotel Vendome, brought 
her much that was pleasant. It had been her 
habit for a number of years to spend a part of 
every autumn in Boston, and she had formed a 
circle of acquaintances and friends there which 



HER LAST ILLNESS. 219 

she loved to re-enter. To some of these friends 
she was strongly attached. Boston became to 
her a sort of haven of intellectual sympathy and 
spiritual rest. She found there in sufficiency, 
more easily than elsewhere, the associations that 
were most agreeable to her ; and every visit that 
she made increased the number of personal 
friendships that possessed the basis of perma- 
nency. While spending her last weeks there 
she still cherished the hope of finishing the 
novel which had been promised to her pub- 
lishers for two years; but she was too ill to com- 
plete an}' arrangements in relation to it. 

In January, 1884, she seemed to recover her 
strength somewhat, but a great change had 
taken place in her sensations. She complained 
that although she knew she was in the world, 
yet she constantly felt as if she were in another. 
Nothing that she saw seemed real to her any 
more. She dreamed, so she said one morning, 
that she had been placed in a small wooden 
house surrounded by a forest ; that she was 



220 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

there to watch, and that there were dead people 
all about her. What this dream might portend 
she did not then seem to understand. To sev- 
eral friends she spoke and wrote of her peculiar 
mental condition, and of the great change that 
had taken place in her feelings. In a letter 
written in March she said : — 

"I feel that during the past 3'ear I have lived the 
life of silence, the life that holds us close to spiritual 
things, more than ever before. . . . Nothing has 
moved me from the supreme vision of that which is 
spiritual and eternal. . . . Suddenly one morning 
I felt nryself separated from the world. I seemed 
to be only an outside spectator of all I had ever seen 
or cared for before, as if I were done with earth 
and its life." 

Yet while these confusing mental impressions 
were crowding upon her, she showed no trace of 
mental alienation, nor did she relax her efforts 
to continue to write. It was sheer determina- 
tion to maintain her hold upon mundane things 
that led her still to seek her desk. Even as 
late as April, 1884, she completed a political 



HER LAST ILLNESS. 221 

letter to the " Independent," which shows no 
trace of mental weakness. It was the last letter 
she ever wrote for publication. Soon afterward 
her left arm became completely paralyzed ; in 
a few days her left side was similarly affected, 
and she could no longer walk. There came a 
day when she could not write ; but this was 
not until June, for having casually become 
aware at the end of May of the death of a 
friend (the fact had been kept from her for 
some weeks for fear of its effect on her mind), 
she called for her writing materials, and in a 
feeble hand wrote the following to Miss Haidee 
Williamson the daughter of the one who had 
been taken away : — 

134 Pennsylvania Avenue, 
Washington, D. C, May 30, 1884. 

Dear Haidee, — Although unable to walk without 
assistance, I was just starting to call on you and 
your clear mother, when a notice of her death was 
placed in my hand. It is a shock that fills me with 
grief. To me she was so lovely, I wanted to think 
of her always as one whom I could seek and see. 



■-: 



222 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

During the entire winter I have been confined to 
ray room by partial paralysis ; but I had alreacty 
begun to count the days when I could go out again, 
see her lovely face and hear her gentle voice, when 
word comes to me that it is hushed forever, and her 
lovely face hidden forever from sight. I mourn 
with 3 T ou who mourn, and especially with your dear 
father, who has lost the mother of his children, the 
delight of his eyes, and the joy of his heart. Nothing 
but mj' helplessness keeps me from coming to you 
to tell you how deephy I S3 - mpathize with you all. 
I am unable to walk or to stand. As soon as I 
can do either, I shall come to you. Till then accept 
my loving S3^mpathy and 1113* affectionate remem- 
brance. When 3-0U are moved to send me a word 
from your heart, do not fail to do it, sure of its 
sacred keeping in my heart. And if it will give 
you and }*our father pleasure, I will write as soon 
as able a loving and faithful obituary of her for the 
New York "Independent." Pardon weakness and 
defects, and believe me your loving and faithful 
friend. 

These were her last written words. When 
she next essayed to use her pen, the feeble little 
hand could only trace unmeaning lines upon 
the paper. The veil was gradually falling, and 



DEATH. 223 

each day the fair world about her was seen 
more dimly, and her impressions of space and 
time grew more faint. Each day until almost 
the very last found her dressed and sitting at 
her pleasant window ; but the once familiar 
scenes grew to be like old memories as she 
looked out upon them. During the last weeks 
she seemed a gentle, affectionate, grateful child. 
She cried with joy when flowers came to her 
chamber from her friends, and was daily sol- 
aced by the sweet-voiced nurse who read 
to her the Psalms from her prayer-book. 
Sweet messages of kindness and of friendship 
fell from her lips ; and when the light of 
her soul flickered to its going out, it was most 
beautiful. 

On the 18th clay of August, 1884, in the 
evening, a few minutes before nine o'clock, 
Mary Clemmer breathed for the last time. The 
unconsciousness that had shielded her from 
pain during the greater part of the last four 
days of utter prostration and paralysis had been 



224 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

lifted as a veil just twelve hours earlier. Then 
with a tremulous voice she had asked the time, 
asked for water to drink, said that it was good, 
and the " Thank-you " then spoken was her last 
word on earth. One who knew her might have 
predicted that the grateful and serene spirit 
would pass thus gently and peacefully from the 
world. More gentle and peaceful no translation 
from mortal life to the new life beyond could 
be. She had wished intensely for continued 
existence here ; but when at last the great 
change came, it was without terror or added 
pain. Sinking thus softly into the slumber 
which knew no waking, it did not seem for 
her more the ending of pain and suffering than 
the beginning of everlasting rest. It hardly 
seemed like death at all. 

A day or two afterward, when her desk was 
opened, there fluttered out a bit of paper on 
which were written some verses which ma3 T per- 
haps be regarded as belonging to the present 
chapter of this volume : — 



DEATH. 225 

COMING BACK. 

'T is whispered oft, the low mysterious story, 

How sometime, somehow, down the shining track, 

Longing for what they 've left, they leave their glory, 
And to the earth and home the dead come back. 

How bitter, lonely, ever is the meeting, 

room familiar ! Loved ones on each chair, 

Where is your old-time teuder tremulous greeting, 
Once all her own ? Alone she walketh there. 

Think how she loved you ! Even Heaven's splendor 

Could not enfold her willingly full fain ; 
Something within her still all human, tender, 

Made her remember, long for her lost home of pain. 

awful stillness of the starry spaces ! 

As uncompanioned, shorn of cheer or mirth, 
Downward she drifted, drifted, found the lost loved places, 

Aud earth's beloved — she no more of earth. 

Loving, and all how near she came unto ye. 

You saw her not, you never dreamed her near ; 
She waved her airy hand, she whispered to ye — 

She was a spirit ! and her words you could not hear. 

When these lines were written it is impos- 
sible to say. They must have been penned 
months before death came, and they indicate 
15 



226 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

that then, if not so fully afterward, she was 
conscious of the significance of the change that 
was coming over her. It cannot be doubted 
that often during the last eight months of her 
life she felt to a very remarkable degree the 
sensations that may be supposed to come to the 
soul that has been liberated from its human 
dwelling-place. 



CHAPTER XII. 

The Funeral. — Rock Creek Churchyard. — Some Per- 
sonal Tributes. 

HPHE 20th of August, 1884, was bright with 

sunshine, yet not sultry, — a perfect late 

summer day in the city of Washington. It 

was such a day as brought Mary Clemmer into 

very close sympathy with Nature when she 

lived, and on such a day she would have wished 

her body to be borne to its resting-place in the 

spot she had herself selected in the ancient 

churchyard of Rock Creek Parish. Years before 

she had written : — 

"I lie amid the golden-rod. 
I love to see it lean and nod ; 
I love to feel the grassy sod 
Whose kindly breast will hold me last, 
Whose patient arms will fold me fast,— 
Fold me from sunshine and from song, 
Fold me from sorrow and from wrong. 
Through gleaming gates of golden-rod 
I '11 pass into the rest of God." 



228 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

The last lines were literally verified, for the 
dusty roadways that led to the churchyard were 
lined with the yellow wild-flower to which she 
was so much attached. The funeral ceremony 
at the house on Capitol Hill was very simple. 
Those who had loved her gathered about the 
peaceful face of the dead, while Dr. Leonard, 
the rector of St. John's, read the burial-service 
and pronounced some simple and fitting words 
upon her life and character. Her sonnet 
" Renunciation " was read, and at the grave it 
seemed appropriate that these verses, written 
many years before, should be spoken ere the 
earth closed upon her : — 

REST. 

Weep not when I am dead, dear friend; 

Sweetheart, grieve not when I lie low ; 
While o'er my clay your soft eyes bend, 

Remember it was good to go. 
When low you press the violet sod 

Whose purple tears enstar my breast, 
Beloved, think I sleep in God, 

Remember such aloue are blest. 



THE FUNERAL. 229 

The perfect silence will be dear, 

How dear the chance of painless rest ; 
And on, beyond all pain or fear, 

The perfect waking will be best- 
How dim this distant day may seem, 

How far the grief we suffer here ! 
This life the mirage of a dream, 

Merged to a morning calm and clear. 

It was a poet's funeral. She was buried on 
the gently sloping hillside, near the venerable 
church originally erected almost two centuries 
ago, whose walls still show the bricks that were 
brought over from England by the first builders. 
Old elms overhang the little edifice, and the 
ivy covers it on every side. Naturally a most 
beautiful place, this churchyard is fast becoming 
through artificial adornment the " Mt. Auburn " 
of Washington. It is one of the oldest of 
American burial-places, and by the terms of 
the grant which established it, parish, church, 
and churchyard are to endure forever. To-day 
there are two other ivy-covered graves beside 
that of Mary Clemmer. Her mother survived 
her only a few months, and in March, 1885, was 



230 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

laid at rest where husband and father had been 
buried in December, 1881. 

The announcement of her death, which was 
utterly unexpected save by a few, was the occa- 
sion of notices of her character and work in all 
the leading daily and weekly newspapers of the 
United States and in some foreign journals. 
It also prompted most generous and touching 
communications in private from those who knew 
and esteemed her to those who were nearest to 
her. Of the published notices, all very kind, 
none seemed so adequate and so finely sympa- 
thetic as that written by a noble woman who 
never saw her, — the article contributed to the 
" Independent " by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 
and here reproduced in full. It was appro- 
priately entitled " The Empty Column." Miss 
Phelps wrote: — 

" Who has not felt, in silent chnrclryards, on 
sunny afternoons, or in purple twilights, the impulse 
to lay a flower on strange graves? As subtile and 



ROCK CREEK CHURCHYARD. 231 

as strong is ray wish to speak a word sacred to the 
memory of a woman whom I never knew and never 
saw. Where else but in the columns of the ' Inde- 
pendent' should one hasten to do honor to the name 
of Mary Clemmer? 

" For many years your reader, and so hers, I 
have absorbed her powerful work with that half- 
unconscious indebtedness which belongs to the public 
as distinct from the private attention, and is so sure 
to be impartial and impersonal that it has a certain 
value, to one's own mind at least. 

" Your great contributor is dead. By the vacancy 
she leaves upon your pages we begin to understand 
what we have lost. By the gap she has left in 
American journalism, the great army of hard-work- 
ing and hard-bestead ' newspaper people,' and that 
imperious, docile, shrewd, simple thing we call their 
public, must estimate the power of this fallen leader. 

"I say ' must estimate.' Who can exactly esti- 
mate an influence at once so strong and so sweet, 
and yet so usual? Like the sun, we were sure of 
her, and perhaps sometimes accepted her with as 
little gratitude. The fine mathematics of force has 
not yet come to measure the relativity of womanhood 
to facts less fine than itself ; and I doubt if most of 
us have realized to what an extent this woman has 
represented for us Womanhood in Politics. Am 
we ashamed of this type? Are we afraid of the 
record ? 



232 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

" Doubtless Mary Clemmer made her mistakes, 
like the rest of us. We ma}' not always have agreed 
with her. She ma}- not have been always right. 
But, surely, she was always after the right. She 
may have been liable to an over-intense judgment 
now and then, like all ardent natures ; but she 
judged under the pressure of ideals which never 
lowered those of her readers, which never lowered 
her calling, which never lowered her work. She 
aimed to purify, rather than to please. She never 
manoeuvred. She did not dodge ; she did not co- 
quet. No one who read her letters from Washing- 
ton, week by week and year by year, could have 
helped feeling that this woman meant to do the 
womanly thing by the public weal ; not the timid thing, 
not the time-serving thing, not the slippery thing, 
but the straightforward, brave, uplifting thing. 

" Her fearlessness used, sometimes, to astonish 
us. Probably there were few men in Washington 
who would not have dreaded her scorching pen, had 
they drawn, or deserved to draw, its fire upon them- 
selves. There were fewer who did not appreciate 
her appreciation. A candidate for the Presidency 
this year has lost in her one of the most powerful 
opponents whom he had to fear. Her praise was as 
generous as her blame was scathing. Whatever she 
did she dared. She reverenced the sacred responsi- 
bilities of her vocation with a feminine conscientious- 
ness. She was afraid of nothing but of not doing 



PERSONAL TRIBUTES. 233 

the best and highest. She may be said to have 
feared Truth and kept its commandments. 

' ' Foremost among the ranks of her profession she 
dropped ; and women who have written songs and 
tales and wrought pictures and statues, and found 
it less easy to work their way to the front in the 
battling and bustling sustained labor involved in 
moulding public opinion through the press, think 
gratefully, to-day T , of her as one who did them honor 
in a hard calling in a womanly way ; for, when we 
say a womanly wa}', we mean, above all else, a 
courageous way and a high-minded way. 

" This is no place for intrusion upon that sacred, 
sheltered sorrow which mourns apart, to-da}', for 
her ; but it may at least be ours to remember, with 
the rights of affectionate sympathy which the readers 
of many years may claim, that she went to the rest 
of death from the i-est of life, and that so it was well 
with her. Happiness found her late ; but it found 
her at last. 

" It is a memorable fact that, with maivy women 
to whom time has brought fame and its inevitable 
toil and probable solitude, the greatest good of life 
has come almost at the last hour. Love has snatched 
them up from loneliness, and held them back from 
the arras of death, only long enough to bestow the 
divine right of joy upon the departing soul. Ma- 
dame de Stael, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Bronte 
— we might, perhaps, add George Eliot — were of 



234 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

this number. The stoi'y was not left half told. The 
song was sung ; the drama was completed. The 
fuller human nature, and the richer human love- 
capacit}', which go with the creative creature, had 
their late but ripe development. 

" Thousands of women who never saw her face 
have been glad that this woman whom we miss was 
happy before she died. In Michael Angelo's great 
picture, ' Death,' a dim, colossal figure knocks at 
the closed door against which Love, a frail child, has 
planted himself despairingly. Out-thrust are the 
tiny arms, to push the giant back. The puzzled face 
of the helpless thing lifts itself to the frown which he 
only — not ourselves — may watch. Nothing can 
be so inexorable as this doom whose face we are not 
permitted to see. 

' ' Most vividly among the memories which Mary 
Clemmer's name starts, for me — among the recol- 
lections of her superb moral courage, her scorn of 
political corruption, her lo}"alty to lofty ideals, her 
fidelity to the soldiers of the Republic, her pictu- 
resque style, rich, womanly imagination, sensitive 
love of Nature, and endless capacit}' for gilding dull 
themes with vivacious light — there comes back, 
with touching distinctness, the vision of her beautiful 
obituary work. 

" How tenderly she treated the weakness and how 
eagerly she wrote of the power of the dead ! How 
careful she was to recall the forgotten incidents, the 



PERSONAL TRIBUTES. 235 

overlooked virtues, to complete her chaplet, trying it 
so delicately that it might seem to be done by the 
very fingers of personal love before she laid it down. 
Who is there to speak of her as she of those who 
were called before her? So graceful and so gracious 
a tribute as she was wont to give, we must wish, 
with all our hearts, that she could receive, now the 
solemn time has come for her, too, which waits us 
all, when we no longer may minister to others but 
only they to us." 

The following is a personal tribute from a 
lady who knew her well and esteemed her 
greatly. It was written in the autumn of 1884 : 

" The grass is growing on Mary Clemmer's grave ; 
but all the way to it, and beyond, so far as human 
love can reach, is covered with flowers. 

"Down from the North, and up from the South, 
and across the Western rivers they have come, un- 
fading blossoms of friendship and love, to mingle 
with the stainless but perishing emblems that we 
reverently laid upon her coffin. There is no need 
for more, almost no room for more ; and yet, saying 
farewell to summer and her together, we who have 
been near her during these last months pause, and 
turn, and drop our own home garland at her feet. 

'* If those who only know her name and pen miss 
her so, what must it be for us, who step inside 



236 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

her home, who see her roses blowing on their 
stems, who feel in all her rooms her own artistic 
grace, where every book, vase, and pictured face 
has caught and keeps the memory of some word of 
hers? 

"To miss the gracious presence and the kindly 
smile, to miss the gentle voice and loving soul, to 
miss the home she gave us in her heart, — all this, 
and this through all the years, and only this, is left 
to us 

"But all the shadows fall on our side, none on 
hers. God her Father and the Universe her home, 
there was no room for anything but light ; and had 
the choice been left her, — death in the full bloom 
of life, or slowly failing strength and creeping age, 
— no one who knew her but could tell which it 
would be. 

"October never fades. The soft opal tints melt 
away, rich and glowing to the last. We only need 
to see it once, and remember it forever. 

" So will she be remembered down the years, the 
bloom and glow of full life all about her. We leave 
her so, a little while at most, and find her so a little 
further on, and keep her so forever and for aye." 

Among the published notices of her which 
were especially full of tender feeling or warm 
regard were those which appeared in the Bos- 



PERSONAL TRIBUTES. 237 

ton " Traveller," the Boston " Advertiser," 
the Boston "Herald," the Boston "Saturday 
Evening Gazette," the New York " Commercial 
Advertiser," the Philadelphia " Record," the 
Philadelphia " Ledger," the Cincinnati " Com- 
mercial Gazette," the Chicago " Inter-Ocean," 
the Chicago " Tribune," the Chicago " Univer- 
salist," the New Orleans " Times-Democrat," 
the Omaha " Excelsior," the Greeley, Colorado, 
" Tribune," and the Washington " National 
Tribune." The " Transcript," of North Adams, 
Massachusetts, contained this striking tribute 
to her : — 

" Among the influences of our time the genius and 
soul of Mary Clemmer will rank with the first. She 
wrote with remarkable eloquence, insight, grace, and 
power, and her words kindled thousands of souls she 
never knew. She wrought a great work, and our 
public life is sweeter and nobler, and America 
breathes freer and deeper, because of the fidelity, 
love, courage, and genius of this noble woman." 

The Boston *' Saturday Evening Gazette " 
said of her : — 



238 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

"There has been no writer of anything like her 
ability who confined herself so much to newspaper 
work. Her composition of this kind was remark- 
ably effective, being sparkling in style, picturesque 
in its descriptive power, thoroughly womanly in its 
tone, and alive with sympathy for all that was good 
and noble. She lived man}* years in Washington, 
and knew the city in its public life better than any 
other of her sex. Her estimates of the public men 
of the last twenty-five years were remarkably well- 
considered and appreciative, and she wrote of them 
with refreshing frankness. A good political history 
of the period might be made from her letters, many 
of which deserve reproduction in permanent form. 
Her poems have long impressed us as among her 
best work, and far superior to much that has had 
more popular currency." 

Many tributes by women who were her ar- 
dent admirers — those whom she called her 
" women-lovers " — were published. From one 
of these signed " E. H." and printed in the Cin- 
cinnati " Commercial Gazette " the following is 
taken: — 

' ' In Mary Clemmer was found not only the fine 
and delicate organization of a sensitive woman, the 



PERSONAL TRIBUTES. 239 

beauty-loving soul of a poet, the iustincts of a house- 
keeper, but her mind could swing readily to great 
questions, to political problems, and with masculine 
force she discussed the party questions of the day. 
She held as much influence in that soft hand of her3 
as any ballot could have given her. 

"She had convictions, she had honesty ; she was 
fearless to denounce, as she was ready to praise. 
Men in "Washington respected her views ; they looked 
for her opinions, and treated with veneration the 
gifted woman in her pretty home beside the Capitol 
door. She was never one to assert her personal 
privileges, to insist on her rights. She was a woman, 
— a gentle lady. You did homage to her woman- 
liness first, then accorded her the crown of genius. 
She was never among the wranglers, — the loud- 
voiced. She expressed herself forcefully but quietly, 
and was seldom denied a hearing. 

" How little I have said ! how poorly said it ! Yet 
were I to write on forever I would not be satisfied 
with nry words. She is gone, and I loved her. How 
then can I say what I would? Grief is ever inco- 
herent ; longing is always blinding. What can I say 
above the coffin of my friend? Who could tell but 
in snatches, and in broken words, the loveliness and 
loss of the departed? And shall we answer to our- 
selves the meaning of the suddenly arrested work of 
Mary Clemmer? 

" There is a little poem she wrote in earlier years 



240 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

— a yellow, discolored slip, — that lies before me. 
With it I will close my imperfect words : — 

u ' Weighted we walk through this weary world, 
The wings of our souls too weak to rise ; 
Under our burdens we feel them furled, 

As we yearning gaze toward the far-off skies. 

" ' Mine eyes gaze deep into human eyes 
To read the sibylline lines of fate, 
The stories of dwarfed and thwarted lives ; 
I see their shadow and feel their weight. 

" ' Come unto me, ye laden ones,' 

Saith the Lord, ' I will give you rest ; ' 
Why under His rising and setting suns 
So many walk weighted, He knoweth best. 

" When shall we cast our weights aside? 

When shall we gather the strength to rise ? 
And the beautiful spirit, lightened, glide 
Into the gates of Paradise ? " 

In his fine and eloquent statement of the con- 
siderations which may support a rational and 
intelligent belief in a new life after the death 
that ends all here, Mr. Edwin Arnold says: 

' ' Birth gave to each of us much ; death may give 
very much more in the waj' of subtler senses to 



PERSONAL TRIBUTES. 241 

behold colors we cannot here see, to catch sounds we 
do not now hear, and to be aware of bodies and ob- 
jects impalpable at present to us, but perfectly real, 
intelligibly constructed, and constituting an organ- 
ized society and a governed, multiform state. Where 
does Nature show signs of breaking off her magic, 
that she should stop at the five organs and the sixt} T 
odd elements ? Are we free to spread over the face 
of this little earth, and never free to spread through 
the solar system and beyond it? Nay, the heavenly 
bodies are to the ether which contains them as mere 
spores of seaweed floating in the ocean. Are the 
specks only filled with life, and not the space? What 
does Nature possess more valuable in all she has 
wrought here, than the wisdom of the sage, the 
tenderness of the mother, the devotion of the lover, 
and the opulent imagination of the poet, that she 
should let these priceless things be utterly lost by a 
quinsy or a flux ? It is a hundred times more rea- 
sonable to believe that she commences afresh with 
such delicately developed treasures, making them 
groundwork and stuff for splendid farther living, by 
process of death, which, even when it seems acci- 
dental or premature, is probably as natural and gen- 
tle as birth ; and wherefrom, it may well be, the 
new-born dead arises to find a fresh world ready for 
his pleasant and novel bod}', with gracious and will- 
ing kindred ministrations awaiting it like those 
which provided for the human babe the guarding 
16 



242 AN AMERICAN WOMAN. 

arms and nourishing breasts of its mother. . . . 
Man is less superior to the sensitive-plant now than 
his re-embodied spirit would probably then be to 
his present personality. Nor does anything except 
ignorance and despondency forbid the belief that the 
senses so etherealized and enhanced, and so fitly 
adapted to the fine combinations of advanced entit}', 
would discover without much amazement sweet and 
friendly societies springing from but proportionately 
upraised above the old associations ; art divinely ele- 
vated ; science splendidly expanding ; b} T gone loves 
and sympathies explaining and obtaining their pur- 
pose ; activities set free for vaster cosmic service ; 
abandoned hopes realized at last ; despaired-of jo}-s 
come magically within ready reach ; regrets and re- 
pentances softened by wider knowledge, surer fore- 
sight, and the discoveiy that though in this universe 
nothing can be ' forgiven,' everything may be repaid 
and repaired." 

These are comforting words. If they be not 
true, then all human life is a mockery. Such a 
life as that of Mary Clemmer, it must be, meets 
its reward and its renewal beyond the grave. 
It was with such a faith as this of Arnold's that 
in one of the numerous poems in which she ex- 
pressed a prevision of the future life, she wrote : 



PERSONAL TRIBUTES. 243 

" I wait, 

Till in white death's tranquillity 
Shall softly fall away from me 
This weary life's infirmity ; 
That I, in larger light, may learn 
The larger truth I would discern, 
The larger love for which I yearn. 

"I wait! 

The summer of the soul is long, 
Its harvests yet shall round me throng 
In perfect pomp of sun and song. 
In stormless mornings yet to be, 
I'll pluck from life's full-fruited tree 
The joy to-day deuied to me." 



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Ticknor and Company. 15 



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- The Bride of the Rhine. Two Hundred Miles 



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16 A List of Books Published by Tichior § Co. 



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WHIST, American or Standard. By G. W. P. Sixth 

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WINCKELMANN'S (John) The History of Ancient Art. 

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WINTER'S (William) English Rambles, and other Fugi- 
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The Trip to England. With Illustrations by 



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WOODS'S (Rev. Leonard) History of the Andover Theo- 
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MR. HOWELLS'S LATEST NOVELS. 

Indian Summer. The Rise of Silas Lapham. A Woman's 
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Out of the Question. A Counterfeit Presentment. 

MR. HOWELLS'S PLAYS. Each inl vol. 32mo. 50 cents. 

The Register. The Parlor-Car. 

The Sleeping-Car. The Elevator. 

MR. HOWELLS'S POEMS. Printed on imported hand-made 

paper. White parchment covers. Enlarged edition. $2.00. 
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TIGKNOR & COMPANY'S NEW BOOKS, 



SPRING OF 1886. 



The prices named below are subject to revision on publication. 



ROMANCE AND REVERIE. By Edgar Fawcktt. 

1 vol. 12mo. Printed ou fine hand-made paper, with gilt top. $2.00. 
A volume of poems, by the author of '' Song and Story." 

" Mr. Fawcett was the man of whom Longfellow expected more than from 
any of the other young American authors, both as a poet and novelist." — 
American Queen. 

" The Revue des Deux Mondes gives high praise to Mr. Fawcett's poetry, 
and compares his briefer lyrics to the famous ' Emaux et Camees ' of 
Theophile Gautier " — Beacon. 

STORIES A ND SKETCHES. By John Boyle O'Reilly, 

editor of the Pilot, author of " Moondyne," Songs, Legends, Ballads, etc. 
1 vol. 12mo. $1.50. 

The great popularity of the author, and the intrinsic merit and interest 
of his writings, will ensure a warm reception to this collection of his latest 
and best works. 

MOPWb KPACHblil-HOCT) (Red-Nosed Frost). CocTaBfi.n, 
HiiKOJiaw A.neKcePBmn> HoKpacoBt. Translated in the origi- 
nal meters from the Rrssinn of N. A. Nekrasov. 

CHRISTIAN SYMBOLS AND STORIES OF THE 

SAINTS. By Clara Erskine Clement Assisted by Katherine E. Con- 
way: 1 vol. Large 12mo. , with many full page illustrations. $2.50. 

This is a revised version of the greater part of the author's " Hand-book 
of Legendary Art," — of which seventeen large editions have been ex- 
hausted. The clear and beautiful explanation of the expressive symbols 
by which men's minds are helped to reverent contemplation of the mysteries 
of revealed religion, leaves nothing to be desired. The "Stories of the 
Saints" will be illustrated by numerous full page engravings from the 
rarest and finest works of the great masters of Christian Art — prominence 
being given to scenes from the life of the Blessed Virgin, and pictures of the 
Evangelists, and the Founders and notable Saints of the Religious Orders. 

MONO GRAPHS F A MER WAN All CHI TE C T URE. 

No. II. The Hartford Capitol. R M. Upjohn, Architect. 

No. III. Ames Memorial Buildings, North Easton. II. H. Richardson, 
Architect. 

Gelatine Plates (from nature), 13x16. Each in portfolio. $5.00. 

The remarkable success of the first Monograph shows the demand exist- 
ing for artistic work of this hiirh grade ; and an equal sale may be 
predicted for the portfolio that illustrates the beautiful marble Gothic 
building of the Connecticut State Capitol. This possesses perhaps even 
a higher interest than the Harvard Law School, because it is a great public 
building, and not an appendage of an institution. 

The American Architect says : " The execution of the work is all that 
could be asked. It would be hard to offer a more encouraging example of 
the kind of work to be expected in this series." 



18 A List of Books Published by 



JOHN BODE WIN'S TESTIMONY. By Mary Hallock 

Foote, Author of" The Led Horse Claim," &c. lvol. 12mo. $1.50. 

"Mrs. Foote's first novel raised her to a level on which she is only to be 
compared with our best women novelists. To make this comparison briefly, 
Miss Woolson observes keenly, Mrs. Burnett writes charmingly, and Mrs. 
Foote feels intensely." — The Critic. 

NEXT DOOR. By Claka Louise Burnham, Author of 

" Dearly Bought," " A Sane Lunatic," &c. lvol. 12mo. SP1.50. 

One of the brightest, prettiest, and most charming tales yet ottered to the 
public. The scene is in Boston, the time the present, the plot exciting, the 
characters lifelike, while the style is graceful and skilful. 

POETS AND PROBLEMS. By George Willis Cooke, 

Author of " Emerson: His Life, Writings and Philosophy." lvol. 12nio. 
$2.00. 

Mr. Cooke brings to his work the most inexhaustible and painstaking 
patience, the most thorough devotion to the labor he has undertaken, and 
the deepest mental sympathy with his subjects. His present work embraces 
Tennyson, Buskin, and Browning. 

THE OLDEN-TIME SERIES. 16mo. Per vol., 50 cents. 

There appears to be, from year to year, a growing popular taste for quaint 
and curious reminiscences of " Ye Olden Time," and to meet this, Mr. 
Henry M. Brooks has prepared a series of interesting handbooks. The 
materials have been gleaned chiefly from old newspapers of Boston and 
Salem, sources not easily accessible, and while not professing to be? history, 
the volumes will contain much material for history, so combined aud 
presented as to be both amusing and instructive. The titles of some of the 
volumes indicate their scope aud their promise of entertainment : — '• Curi- 
osities of the Old Lottery," "Days of the Spinning Wheel," "Some 
Strange and Curious Punishments," '.' Quaint and Curious Advertisements,'' 
"Literary Curiosities," "New-England Sunday," etc. 

THE IMPERIAL ISLAND— ENGLAND'S CHRON- 
ICLE IN STONE. By James F. Hu.n.newell. 1 vol. 8vo. Richly 
illustrated. $3.50. 

This admirable aud impressive work is a companion to the same author's 
well-known " Historical Monuments of France," and contains a vivid 
record of the life of Merrie England, as exemplified by her august castles 
and palaces, abbeys and cathedrals. 

LIFE AND WORKS OF MRS. CLEMMER. 

AN AMERICAN WOMAN'S LIFE AND WORK. 

A Memorial of Mary Clemmer, by Edmuxd Hudsox, with Portrait. 

POEMS OF LIFE AND NATURE. 

HIS TWO WIVES. 

MEN, WOMEN, AND THINGS. Revised and 

augmented. 

The whole in four 12mo volumes, tastefully bound, forming a beauti- 
ful, uniform set of the selected works, together with the memorial 
biography of this popular and lamented writer 



Tichior and Company. 19 



THE SAUNTERER. Bv Charles Goodrich Whiting. 

1 vol. 16mo. $1.25. 

A rare and choice collection of charming little essays and poems about 
nature, some of which have won the highest possible commendation from 
Stedman and other eminent critics. The author has for many years been 
connected with the editorial staff of "The Springfield Republican." 

THE LOST NAME. By Mrs. Madeleine Vinton Dahl- 

GRKN, author of " A Washington Winter," " South-sea Sketches," etc. 
1 vol. 12mo. §1.50. 

The remarkable success of Mrs. Dahlgren's previous portrayals of society 
make it certain that her forthcoming work will be full of life aud purpose, 
and therefore sure to attract and interest. 

ITALIAN POETS. By W. D. Howells. 12mo. $1.50. 

Biographical and Critical Notices of the masters of Italian poetry. 

A SEA CHANGE ; or, Love's Stowaway. A Comic 

opera. By W. D. Howells. 1 vol. 16mo. Little-Classic size. 

THE VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN OF GENERAL POPE 

IN 1862. Being Volume II. of Papers read before the Military His- 
torical Society of Massachusetts. With Slaps aud Plaus. 1 vol. 8vo. 
$3.00. 

THE YOUNG PEOPLE'S TENNYSON. Students' 

Edition. 1 vol. 16mo. Edited, with Notes and Introduction, by W. J. 
Rolfe. Beautifully illustrated. 75 cents. 

SELECT POEMS OF TENNYSON. Second Part. 

Students' Edition. Edited, with Notes and Introduction, by W. J. Rolfe. 
lvol. 16mo. Beautifully illustrated. 75 cents. 

SONGS AND BALLADS OF THE OLD PLANTA- 
TION'S, BY UNCLE REM US. By Joel Chandler Harris. 1 vol. 
12mo. $1.50. 

"Uncle Remus's " legends have created a strong demand for his songs, 
which will be eagerly welcomed. 

A ROMANTIC YOUNG LADY. By Robert Grant, 

author of " The Confessions of a Frivolous Girl," " An Average Man," etc. 
1 vol. 12mo. $1.50. 

This is the latest and one of the strongest works of the successful deline- 
ator of modern society life and manners. It will be read eagerly and 
enjoyably by thousands of lovers of the best fiction. 

A NEW AND ENLARGED CONCORDANCE TO 

THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. By Rev. J. B. R. Walker. 

This monumental work of patient industry and iron diligence is indispen- 
sable to all students of the Bible, to which it is the key and introduction. 
Many errors and omissions in the plans of the older Concordances have 
been avoided in this one, which also bears reference to the Revised Bible, 
as well as to the King- James version. 



20 A List of Boohs Published by 



JUST PUBLISHED. 

THE STORY OF MARGARET KENT. By Henry 

Hates. 1 vol. 12mo. $1.50. 6th thousand. 

A new and thrilling novel of literary life in New York, written with mas- 
terly skill. One of the most exacting of reviewers says that it will "con- 
vince and touch thoughtful and sensitive readers"; and another, a 
well-known novelist and poet, says : " The plot and situations are original 
and natural. It is out of the common run, and sparkles with life — real 
life — aud deep feeling." 

AMERICAN WHIST. By G. W. P. 1 vol, 16mo. 

Sixth Edition, Revised. $1.00. 

A new and fully revised and much-enlarged edition of this foremost clas- 
sic, best teacher, and wisest companion as to the most enjoyable game of 
cards. After running through several successful editions during the past 
five years, this invaluable book is now to be brought out improved in many 
ways, and will be indispensable to all who play Whist 

CLEOPATRA. By HENRY Gi:E"vILLE. Original Copy- 
right Edition, with new Portrait. 1vol. 16mo. $1.25. 

"Cleopatra" is a brilliant new novel by the author of " Dosia " and 
" Dosia's Daughter," who is acknowledged as foremost among the European 
novelists of to-day. The remarkable success that has attended Henry 
Greville's previous works, foreshadows the popular demand for " Cleopa- 
tra," her latest (aud iu many respects, her best) novel. 

E VERY-DAY RELIGION. By Rkv. James Freeman 

Clarke, D.D., Author of "Self-Culture," " The Ideas of Paul," &c, &c. 
1 vol. 12mo. $1.50. 

An admirable group of terse, strong, and practical discourses on the 
religion of the home, the office, the work-shop, and the field. It tells how, 
amid the cares and annoyances of this workaday world, one may grow 
towards a noble and peaceful life. It will be an invaluable companion, 
an indispensable " guide, philosopher, and friend." The eminent success of 
James Freeman Clarke in works of this high class is shown by the great 
popularity of his " Self-Culture," which is now in its eleventh edition. 

EDGE-TOOLS OF SPEECH. By Maturin M. Ballou, 

Author of "A Treasury of Thought," "Due South," &c, &c. 1vol. 
8vo. $3.50. 

" A great new work, in which are preserved the choicest expressions and 
opinions of the great thinkers and writers of all ages, from Confucius to 
Ruskin. These pungent apothegms and brilliant memorabilia are all 
carefully classified by topics ; so that the choicest work of many years 
of patient labor in the libraries of America and Europe is condensed into 
perfect form and made readily available. It will be indispensable to all 
writers and speakers, and should be iu every library " — Traveller. 

TWO COLLEGE GIRLS. By Helen Dawes Brown. 

1 vol. 12mo. $1 50. 

One of the most important of recent books. It is a capital study of 
girl-students from Boston, New York, and Chicago, exemplifying the most 
piquant characteristics of the respective phases of civilization and social 
criteria of the three cities. It is suited alike to old and young, being rich 
in beautiful passages of tender pathos, strong, simple and vivid, and full of 
sustaining interest. Nothing has been published since " Little Women " 
that will so strike the popular taste. 



Tichior and Company. 21 



LIGHT ON THE HIDDEN WA Y. With an Introduc- 

tion by James Freeman Clarke. 1 vol. 16mo. SI. 00. 

A remarkable and thrilling romance of immortality, illustrating by au 
account of personal experiences the relations between the seen and the 
unseen. All readers of the literature of the supernatural in books like 
" The Little Pilgrim," &c, will be profoundly interested in this strange 
record of the nearness of the spiritual and material worlds. 

THE PRELATE. By Isaac Henderson. 12mo. $1.50. 

A story of the American colony and native society in Home. The situa- 
tions in this powerful book are among the most intense and dramatic of 
anything that has been offered by an American author for years. 

INDIAN SUMMER. By W. D. Howells, Author of 

"The Rise of Silas Lapham," &c. 1 vol. 12mo. $1.50. 

" Mr. Howells's new story is in his pleasantest vein, full of his quiet humor 
clothed in the neatest expressions. It is international : the contrast of 
American and foreign ways runs through it. and Mr. Howells has added 
the contrast of the old and the new Americanism. The hero is a Western 
journalist, a Mugwump, much given to banter of the American sort." — 
The Nation. 

A STROLL WITH KEATS. By Frances Clifford 

Brown. 1 vol. Illustrated. Square 16mo. $1.50. 

One of the choicest gems of art in illustration, consisting of illuminated 
pages, in beautiful designs, illustrating some of the finest verses of the great 
English poet. 

THE SPHINX'S CHILDREN AND OTHER PEO- 

PLE'S By Rose Terry Cooke, Author of " Somebody's Neighbors," &c. 
1 vol. 12mo. $1.50. 

This volume of short stories, reprinted from the author's contribu- 
tions to the Atlantic, Harper's, T/ie Galaxy, &c. , will be found like 
"Somebody's Neighbors," to show ''that profound insight into Puritan 
character, and that remarkable command of Yankee dialect, in which Mrs. 
Cooke has but one equal, and no superior. These exquisite chronicles are 
full of high local color, pathos and piquancy, and their perusal is attended 
with alternate tears and smiles. Their narration is vigorous and spirited, 
sparkling in all points, and outlined with rare dramatic skill." 

THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF GOETHE. The Lee- 

tures at the Concord School of Philosophy for 1885. Edited by F. B. San- 
born and W. T. Harris. 1vol. 12mo With 2 portraits. $2.00. 

" A work of exceptional interest, containing fifteen of the lectures concern- 
ing Goethe which were read at the Concord School of Philosophy last 
summer. Prof. Hewett furnishes an account of the newly-discovered 
Goethe manuscripts for the introduction to the volume. Among the writ- 
ers are Drs. Bartol and Hedge, Mrs. Howe, Mrs. Cheney, Mrs. Sherman of 
Chicago, Mr. Soldan of St. Louis, Mr. Snider of Cincinnati, Mr. Partridge 
of Brooklyn, N. Y. , Mr. Davidson of New Jersey, Prof. White of Ithaca, 
N. Y., and Messrs Emery, Harris, and Sanborn of Concord, the last named 
the editor." — Traveller 

LIFE AND LETTERS OF HENRY WADS WORTH 

LONGFELLOW. Edited by Rev. Samuel Longfellow. 2 vols. 12mo. 
$6.00. With new steel engraved Portraits and many wood Engravings. 
Also a limited edition de Luxe, ivith Proof Portraits. 

The biography of the foremost American poet, written by his brother, is 
probably the most important work of the kind brought out in the United 
States for years. It is rich in domestic, personal, and family interest, anec- 
dotes, reminiscences, and other thoroughly charming memorabilia. 



22 A List of Books Published by 

THE 

MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON, 

In Four Volumes. Quarto. 

With more than 500 Illustrations by famous artists and engravers, all 
made for this work. 

Edited by JUSTIN WINSOK, Librarian of Harvard University. 

Among the contributors are : — 

Gov. John D. Long, Dr. 0. W. Holmes, 

Hon. Charles Francis Adams, John 6. Whittier, 

Kev. Phillips Brooks, D D., Rev. J F. Clarke, D.D., 

Rev. K. E. Hale, D.D., Rev A. P. Peabody, D.D., 

Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, Col. T. VT, Higglnson, 

Hon. J. Hammond Trumbull, Professor Asa Gray, 

Admiral G. H. Preble, Gen. F. W. Palfrey, 
Henry Cabot Lodge. 



Volume I. treats of the Geology, Fauna, and Flora; the Voyages and Maps of 
the Northmen, Italians, Captain John Smith, and the Plymouth Settlers ; 
the Massachusetts Company, Puritanism, and the Aborigines ; the Lit- 
erature, Life, and Chief Families of the Colonial Period. 

Vol. II. treats of the Royal Governors ; French and Indian Wars ; Witches 
and Pirates; The Religion, Literature, Customs, and Chief Families of the 
Provincial Period. 

Vol. III. treats of the Revolutionary Period and the Conflict around Boston ; 
and the Statesmen, Sailors, and Soldiers, the Topography, Literature, and 
Life of Boston during that time ; and also of the Last Hundred Years' 
History, the War of 1812, Abolitionism, and the Press. 

Vol. IV. treats of the Social Life, Topography, and Landmarks, Industries, 
Commerce, Railroads, and Financial History of this Century in Boston ; 
with Monographic Chapters on Boston's Libraries, Women, Science, Art, 
Music, Philosophy, Architecture, Charities, etc. 



*** Sold by subscription only. Send for a Prospectus to the 
Publishers, 

TICKNOR AND COMPANY, Boston. 



Ticknor and Company. 23 



THE CHOICEST EDITIONS 



FIVE GREAT MODERN POEMS. 



Drawn and engraved under the care of A. V. S. Anthony. Each in 
one volume, 8vo. elegantly bound, with full gilt edges, in a neat box. 
Each poem, in cloth, $0.00 ; in tree calf, or antique morocco, ©10.00; 
in crushed levant, extra, with silk linings, $25.00. Copiously illustrated 
after drawings by Thomas Moran, E. H. Garrett, Hairy Eenn, A. B. 
frost, and other distinguished artists. 

CHILDE HAROLD. 

The choicest gift-book of 1885-188G. With nearly 100 noble Illustra- 
tions, of great artistic value and beauty, representing the splendid 
scenery and architecture of the Rhine, Greece, Italy, etc. 

THE PRINCESS. 

The most famous poem of Alfked, Loud Tennyson. With 120 
new and beautiful Illustrations. 

" The most superb book of the season. The exquisite binding makes a fit 
casket for'i'ennyson's enchanting ' 1'iincess.' " — Hartford Journal. 

THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 

A superb fine-art edition, with 120 Illustrations. The choicest edition 
of Scott's wonderful poem of Scottish chivalry. 

" On page after page are seen the great dome of Ben-an rising in mid-air. huge 
Ben-venue throwing his shadowed masses upon the lakes, and the long heights ol 
Ben Lomond hemming the horizon." —Atlantic Monthly. 

LUCILE. 

By Owen Meredith. With 1G0 Illustrations. 
The high peaks of the Pyrenees, the golden valleys of the Kbineland, 
and the battle-swept heights of the Crimea. 

" This new edition is simply perfect — paper, type, printing, and especially the 
illustrations, — a most charming Christmas gift.'' — American Literary 
Churchman. 

MARMION. 
With more than 100 Illustrations, and Borders. 
" Wild Scottish beauty. Never had a poem of stately and immortal beauty a 
more fitting setting." — Chicago Inttr-Ocean. 



For Sale by Booksellers. Sent, postpaid, on receipt of price, by the 
Publishers, 

TICKNOR AND COMPANY, Boston. 



THE 

AMERICAN ARCHITECT 

AND BUILDING NEWS. 

An Illustrated Weekly Journal of Architecture and the Building Trades. 

Each number is accompanied by six fine quarto illustrations, while 
illustrative cuts are liberally used in the text. Although the paper 
addresses itself primarily to architects and builders, by its discussions 
upon matters of interest common to those engaged in building pursuits, 
it is the object of the editors to make it acceptable and necessary to 
that large portion of the educated classes who are interested in and 
appreciate the importance of good architectural surroundings, to civil 
and sanitary engineers, draughtsmen, antiquaries, craftsmen of all kinds, 
and all intelligent readers. 

As an indication of the feeling with which this journal is regarded 
by the profession, we quote the following extract from a report of a com- 
mittee of the American Institute of Architects upon "American Archi- 
tectural Journals": — 

"At Boston, Mass., is issued the American Architect and Building 
News, a weekly of the first class, and, it must be acknowledged, the only 
journal in this country that can compare favorably with the great London 
architectural publications. It is very liberally illustrated with full-page litho- 
graphic impressions of the latest designs of our most noted architects, and with 
occasional views of celebrated European buildings. Once a month a fine gelatine 
print is issued in a special edition. Its editorial department is conducted in a 
scholarly, courteous, and, at the same time, independent tone, and its selections 
made with excellent judgment. It is the accepted exemplar of American archi- 
tectural practice, and is found in the office of almost every architect in the 
Union. - ' — April 15, 1885. 

Subscription Prices. (In Advance.) 

Rkgulak Edition. — $6.00 per year; $3.50 per half year. 

Gelatine Edition (the same as the regular edition, but including 
12 or more Gelatine Prints). — $7.00 per year ; $4.00 per half year. 

Imperial Edition (the same as the regular edition, but including 
40 Gelatine Prints, and 3G additional double-page Photo-Lithographic 
Prints). — $10.00 year; $6.00 per half year. 

Monthly Edition (identical with the first weekly issue for each 
month, but containing no Gelatine Prints). — $1.75 per year; $1.00 per 
halt vear. 

fiound volumes for 1876, 1S77, 1878, 1879, 1880, 1881, $10.50; 1882, 
1883, 1884, and 18S5, $9.00 each. 

Bound volume (Gelatine edition) for 1885. $10.00. 

Specimen numbers and advertising rates furnished on application to 
the publishers, 

TICKNOR AND COMPANY, 

211 TREMONT STREET, BOSTON, MASS. 



